According to guidance published on January 6, U.S. hospitals will no longer be required to report daily COVID deaths to the federal government as part of their general reporting as of Feb. 2. On the same day that the Department of Health and Human Services announced the changes to reporting requirements, none other than Dr. “EZ-Kill” Emanuel published an article in JAMA (with Dr. Michael Osterholm as a co-author), in which he states that the virus is here to stay:
“The goal for the ‘new normal’ with COVID-19 does not include eradication or elimination, e.g., the ‘zero COVID’ strategy. Neither COVID-19 vaccination nor infection appear to confer lifelong immunity. Current vaccines do not offer sterilizing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Infectious diseases cannot be eradicated when there is limited long-term immunity following infection or vaccination or nonhuman reservoirs of infection.”
China showed that a zero-COVID policy can be implemented, although barriers—ideological, logistical and cultural—have have prevented such a policy from being widely carried out in the world.
Treating COVID-19 as just one among other diseases, Emanuel called for policymakers to “retire” such categories of data collection as “deaths from pneumonia and influenza or pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19, and focus on a new category: the aggregate risk of all respiratory virus infections.”
