Biden untroubled by virus, but experts are

US President Joe Biden's declaration that the "pandemic is over" in the United States could have worrying consequences, according to experts who have been quick to correct him — with eyebrows also raised in Europe.

Biden's remarks playing down the current threat posed by COVID-19 came in an interview aired on Sunday, setting off a torrent of criticism by public health professionals that is still playing out.

In the interview, on the CBS network's 60 Minutes show, Biden said: "We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over."

The backlash over the president's remarks has been setting in, with major US media outlets pointing out that the pandemic is "surely not over" when at least 400 people were dying each day from COVID-19 during the first half of September.

David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that he worried that Biden's saying the pandemic "is over" can lead to a sense of complacency.

Dowdy cautioned that there are uncertainties about what will happen in winter, and the country should prepare for a new wave of infections in the future as a result of new variants in the months ahead.

"We know that respiratory viruses like the flu often get worse over the winter. The same factors that work to make that happen could also cause a wave of COVID-19 in the winter as well," Dowdy told China Daily.

"It's unlikely that wave would be quite as severe as seen in the last two winters — but it's still very possible that we will see an increase in COVID-19 (and other respiratory viruses) over the winter."

Dowdy noted that while it is "reassuring" that there hasn't been a major wave in the past six months, it is important to keep in mind the possibility of bouts of infection in the future, either from a new variant or from waning immunity as people get further away from their last infection or vaccination.

A fantasy

Another expert, Eric J. Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, noted that declaring the pandemic "is over" is a fantasy right now, as all the data points to the fact that the virus is not contained in the US.

"A daily toll in the hundreds is a tragedy, because most COVID deaths could have been prevented by vaccinations, boosters and early treatments," the professor of molecular medicine wrote in an opinion piece.

The virus is still fulfilling its principal objective of finding a huge number of new or repeat hosts to help spread and perpetuate itself, as there have been more than 2 million confirmed new coronavirus infections in the past month, according to Topol.

"Considering the untested and unreported cases, the real number is a multiple of that, most probably at least fivefold," he wrote.

A new Omicron-spawn COVID-19 strain, named as BF.7 by scientists, started creating waves among virus trackers this past week, outpacing nearly all other variants of interest that scientists are tracking in the US this autumn, the Fortune media organization reported on its website on Wednesday.

BF.7 is only beginning to grow in the US, but it has already taken off in other countries, including Belgium, which has seen the lion's share of BF.7 cases identified globally at 25 percent.

Other European countries have each seen 10 percent of the world's identified cases so far, according to the report.

Asked to comment on Biden's remark that "the pandemic is over" at a briefing on Tuesday, the European Medicines Agency's Chief Medical Officer Steffen Thirstrup said: "I cannot obviously answer why President Biden came to that conclusion. We in Europe still consider the pandemic as ongoing and it's important that member states prepare for rollout of the vaccines and especially the adaptive vaccines to prevent further spread of this disease in Europe."

Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, noted that Biden's off-the-cuff comment on the pandemic has sparked outrage from all sides, with Republicans accusing him of hypocrisy as he asks Congress for more COVID-19 funding, while some on the left point to the disease's continuing death toll as evidence that the pandemic is far from its finish line.