EFE
Washington
The United States government announced on Thursday an extension of the emergency declaration for the covid-19 pandemic for an additional 90 days to respond to a hypothetical increase in cases during the winter months.
In a statement, the Administration led by Democrat Joe Biden reported the extension of the emergency declaration, which has been in force since January 2020.
At the end of September, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, said that although the country has made significant progress in its fight against covid-19 compared to last year, the pandemic is not over yet.
“Between 300 and 400 people a day die from covid. We are not over it,” he told a group of reporters on a visit to a vaccination center in Washington.
The comments of the person in charge of the Health portfolio thus qualified the statements that the US president, Joe Biden, had previously given to the CBS network, where he assured that “the pandemic is over.”
“What the president said is what everyone feels, that we are much better now” than a year ago, Becerra said.
However, Biden’s statement has already had an echo among Republicans in Congress, who seek to lift the declaration of national emergency due to covid-19.
A group of 17 House lawmakers wrote a letter asking Biden to kill the measure, and a Republican senator introduced a resolution for the upper house to vote on the same.
“The federal government has spent some ten billion dollars, which has resulted in an economic crisis,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
Becerra dismissed the idea of lifting the emergency declaration now and said that in order to make a decision, they must wait for the scientific community to make a pronouncement.
“We are going to wait for the scientists to give us a guide and tell us where we stand,” he assured.
Between August and September 2022, the US reported an average of 356 deaths per day from covid-19 and the disease caused by the virus is the third leading cause of death in the country, after cancer and heart disease.
Posted on October 13, 2022
