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(CNN) --
When Delta Air Lines referred to COVID-19 as an "ordinary seasonal virus" after a federal judge struck down the Biden administration's mask mandate for public transportation, she was partly right: There are some. evidence that it is seasonal.
But it is far from common and is not the same as the flu.
The lifting of the mask mandate on public transportation marks another turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, and there are many ways to describe the situation at this turning point.
Covid-19 is widespread
While not ordinary, COVID-19 is certainly common.
In the past two years, official case counts suggest nearly a quarter of the country has been infected with coronavirus, with the number of actual infections estimated to be many times higher than what has been reported.
Despite a dramatic drop in cases in recent months, more than 35,000 people in the United States are infected daily, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, enough to fill Madison Square Garden almost twice a day.
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Cases in northeastern states are rising faster than others, which may turn into a broader national wave, just as the region has done in the past two springs.
This year, covid-19 is also combatable.
Vaccines have been shown to be remarkably effective.
In February, fully vaccinated people were five times less likely to be hospitalized with covid-19 and 10 times less likely to die, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC.
The risk was even lower for those who also received a booster shot.
Some treatments have also resisted the omicron variant, and the federal government is shipping hundreds of thousands of antivirals every week.
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Covid-19 is not normal and is more serious than the flu
Covid-19 is still not normal.
Even though measures of severe covid-19 are drastically improving, they are still much worse than even the most severe flu.
The 2017-18 flu season was one of the worst in decades.
It is estimated that 710,000 people were hospitalized and 52,000 died.
Daily deaths from covid-19 are hitting their lowest point in a year, but even with a relatively low rate of 400 deaths per day, the virus has still killed more people in two months than the flu in a full year in his worst moment.
At the height of the omicron variant surge just a few months ago, more people died of covid-19 in just a few weeks than in a full year of flu.
Covid-19 hospitalizations recently hit the lowest point on record and new hospitalizations over the past week were still three times higher than the latest weekly flu admissions, CDC data shows.
And covid-19 is still unpredictable.
Covid-19 has some similarities to the flu, but it's not the same, said Dr. Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and acting chair of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biologics. Medicines of the United States, FDA.
"We are in uncharted territory," he said.
"With the flu, we pretty much know what to expect, but with covid we're learning every day," Monto said.
Two preliminary articles published last year describe the seasonal patterns of the waves of the pandemic so far and suggest that these patterns may repeat themselves in the following years.
These seasonal patterns can help leaders anticipate surges and places like health care facilities to prepare appropriately, but "they aren't always dominant," said Dr. Donald Burke, an infectious disease expert and former dean of the Graduate School. in Public Health from the University of Pittsburgh, co-author of the papers with Dr. Hawre Jalal.
The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
"If something like a particularly transmissible strain comes into play, like omicron, then that can overwhelm and change patterns," Burke said.
"Omicron really messed things up."
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The future is still unclear
In December, Sen Pei, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, told CNN that "we were still a long way" from an endemic stage of the pandemic.
A vast majority of the population would need to have immunity to the virus either through infection or vaccination before reaching that point, he said then.
The rise of omicron has dramatically raised the level of immunity in the US population and brought us closer to that point, but the future of covid-19 is still unclear.
"In the long term, I think it very much depends on whether new variants will come out, which is very unpredictable at the moment," he said Tuesday.
"It's not clear what the endemic pattern will look like and whether we've entered that phase at this point."
After the White House pushback, Delta Air Lines adjusted how it characterized COVID-19, praising the lifting of the carry mask mandate as COVID-19 "transitions to a more manageable respiratory virus."
But the CDC still recommends wearing masks on planes.
There are conflicting opinions about the next steps in the covid-19 pandemic within the public health community and sometimes even within individuals themselves.
Monto says abandoning the skin mandate now, in what he hopes will be the end of the BA.2 variant's rise, "may not be too bad" but it may also be "a few weeks too soon because" I'm not sure where we're going."
In any case, continuous vigilance remains essential.
“We have to be vigilant and respond to what is happening,” he said.
“We have never seen a coronavirus pandemic before.”
-- CNN's Kevin Liptak and Jacqueline Howard contributed to this report.
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