Well, it depends on whom you ask. There are those who insist it is not over. Hundreds of people are still dying of this disease every day. Most of us can name one or two of our own friends or family members who have recently tested positive and are feeling pretty sick at the moment. On the other hand, there are those who assert that it is over—or never really existed—and are back to living their “normal” lives.

While there may be a feeling that life has returned to normal, experts say the pandemic is not over. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are still occurring in the US, and more powerful variants are emerging as the virus continues to spread and mutate globally.

The good news is that confirmed COVID cases are far below where they were during the last two winters; the bad news is they are expected to rise. The number of cases reported is believed to be lower than they actually are since more people are testing at home. ” An average of 385 people died each day from the virus last month, according to CDC data.

In case you have lost track, from January 2020 to February 2023 there have been 101,752,396 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than I million deaths in the United States. (At this time, there are no numbers available for the first three months of 2023.) While the latest COVID deaths reported to WHO now exceeds 3.3 million worldwide, this is thought to be a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to COVID. So, we don’t really know the full extent of Covid deaths.

The US death rate continues to be higher than that of other wealthy industrialized countries, which is “a complete and utter tragedy,” in the view of Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The vast majority of these deaths could have been prevented,” she says. “They have occurred since the development of the Covid-19 vaccines.” The US is lagging behind simply because we have not vaccinated enough adults against the virus, and people who are not vaccinated are most likely to die.

I have scoured the Web in search of how many Covid deaths there have been so far this year. Either WHO and the CDC are no longer counting US deaths, or they just aren’t posting them anywhere. This is as much as I was able to find:

Once again, the bad news: Robert Hart, a Forbes Staff writer who covers breaking news, wrote: “As the US enters the fourth year of the pandemic, data shows hundreds of people still dying with the virus every day, an infectious omicron offshoot tearing across the country, and dismal appetite for updated booster shots.” On the other hand, (the good news) according to NBC online, “Covid deaths have leveled out below 600 deaths a day since the omicron wave subsided in early 2022.” It’s hard to think of six hundred people a day dying from Covid as good news, but the numbers do keep going down.

Finally, the question: is Covid over? And the answer is: NO.