It was a comment that launched a thousand headlines and not a few late night jokes to the guffaws of fully masked audiences. “The pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden told CBS News anchor Scott Pelley as they walked through the Detroit Auto Show, trailed by cameras filming for the subsequent “60 Minutes” broadcast that aired on Sept. The fight against the virus - one that successfully mobilized a large portion of the population and unleashed a torrent of federal resources onto the local level, ripped away pretense and exposed fundamental cracks in our social fabric - is shifting into a new maintenance phase, and there will be no tickertape parade. The end of the emergency wouldn’t be that big of a deal, was the message. An additional 12, mostly to do with health care facilities, were already set to expire on Oct. The most onerous of the restrictions - those requiring businesses to shut down or restrict occupancy and civilians to wear masks in most situations - had been lifted earlier in the year. Most of the 85 emergency orders that Inslee issued in the past two and a half years to arrest the virus had already expired or been retired. That week, the state would report 84.3 cases for every 100,000 Washingtonians and 6,453 cases overall - a precipitous drop from the 1,804.7 rate and 138,172 cases in the January 2022 Omicron-driven spike. The virus - while still claiming hundreds of lives every day, nationally - was relatively under control in Washington, Inslee said. “Accordingly, I’m announcing today that the emergency declaration will lapse on Oct. “We are now in a position to be able to continue our efforts against COVID in multiple ways, without the necessity of an emergency order declaration by the state of Washington,” Inslee told the media on Sept. Jay Inslee announced the end of the coronavirus state of emergency after more than two years, he did so with matter-of-fact language.
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