'The pandemic is over,' Biden says in TV interview

"We still have a problem with Covid," the president said on CBS. "We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over."

President Joe Biden speaks during a bilateral meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office on Sept. 16, 2022.Pete Marovich / Pool via Getty Images

Sept. 19, 2022, 7:22 AM +0530 / Updated Sept. 19, 2022, 7:41 AM +0530

By Alex Johnson

After more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. and almost three years of lockdowns and economic disruption, President Joe Biden declared the coronavirus pandemic is over in an interview that aired Sunday.

Biden said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that “we still have a problem with Covid,” adding: “We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.”

CBS News said the interview was conducted Thursday, before the president flew to the United Kingdom for observances of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

The World Health Organization reported last week that new weekly worldwide deaths reached their lowest point in the first week of September since the coronavirus epidemic was declared a pandemic in March 2020. 

“We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing last week.