In The News

It's time to declare an end to this pandemic. As a member of congress, an internal medicine physician and the former chief medical officer for Sacramento County, I don't say this lightly.

This doesn't mean that COVID has disappeared or that we won't continue to see people get ill, become hospitalized and die from this virus. There's no guarantee that we won't face new variants, some more evasive of our current vaccines or more threatening than Omicron. But as we enter the third year of the pandemic, it's time we acknowledge that this virus is here to stay, and we must learn how to manage and live with it as we have with other respiratory pathogens.

We need to get our lives back. And we can.

Thanks to the ingenuity of our nation's scientists, researchers, health care professionals and volunteers, we now know so much more about this virus and have several safe and effective vaccines that offer strong protection, including against severe illness, hospitalization and death. It's our duty to continue to encourage Americans to get vaccinated and boosted, since it's clear that this is the best tool we have right now to combat COVID.

We need to continue to further invest in research to discover newer vaccines that may be more effective against new variants, and we need to research the viability of nasal or oral vaccines. We should continue to support the health departments, researchers and scientists to ensure that we are ready for the challenges any future illnesses may stress on our health systems.

We must continue to work with academia, the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical industry to develop newer therapies that will help manage and treat COVID. In the past few months, we have seen promising anti-virals like PAXLOVID, older ones like Remdesivir, as well as therapies like monoclonal antibodies. As we've learned with other viruses, we may need a cocktail of multiple antiviral therapies to best attack COVID and prevent the emergence of new variants.

To get our lives back to normal, we need to have all our children back in school and keep them there. The setbacks our children have faced and the challenges to parents have been immeasurable. We can keep our schools open while also keeping students, teachers, and staff safe.

Congress has provided billions of dollars to school districts that can be used to improve the ventilation systems within classrooms to create a safer learning environment. School districts and daycares across the country should immediately upgrade to high-efficient particulate air fan/filtration systems. These new filtration systems will also reduce influenza rates and improve asthma care.

COVID has clearly highlighted the need to build a robust public health system. We have consistently neglected and allowed public health departments to atrophy, leaving us unprepared. Now that we have spent billions of dollars combating COVID, we must build off these investments to improve our overall community health. We need better bio and wastewater surveillance, improved genetic sequencing to more quickly identify new variants or novel viruses and a public health workforce that can help our vaccination campaigns and address other public health issues.

We've learned that masks help mitigate the transmission of COVID and possibly other illnesses. We should continue to wear masks when we have flare-ups of respiratory viruses or have cold or flu symptoms. With readily available at-home rapid tests, we can now test ourselves if we have a runny nose, sore throat or are going to visit a vulnerable friend or relative. And with the adoption of telework, tele-health and remote learning, we can continue to stay connected if we are ill without totally isolating ourselves or putting others at risk.

It's been a long and challenging two years for us all. It will take time to recover from the social, economic, health and mental health challenges we've faced. But as we transition from the COVID-19 pandemic to endemic, the first step to recovery is to reclaim our lives. It's time we take that first step.

Congressman Ami Bera represents California's 7th congressional district, which includes Elk Grove, Folsom and Rancho Cordova.