Dr. Stephanie Silvera Spoke to WBGO about the End of Governor Murphy’s COVID Briefings

Dr. Stephanie Silvera, Professor in the Public Health Department, recently spoke with WBGO about the end of Governor Murphy’s COVID briefings.

Dr. Silvera stated that the case numbers currently indicate that a crisis remains. “We still have very high levels of cases in some areas,” Dr. Silvera said, adding that the numbers vary among counties. “There are still high hospitalization rates; we’re still having nationally over a thousand people a day die of this disease. That is not normal.”

“Not as many people are home at 1 o’clock on an average day to watch those briefings,” she said. “So they end up getting digested by the media and then shared.”

Additionally, Governor Murphy has discussed “transitioning into an endemic” many times recently. Dr. Silvera said the term is being misused.

“It’s sort of a little pet peeve of mine because people are now throwing around the term,” she added. “Most people have no idea what that term means.”

An endemic means that rates are static, neither rising nor falling.

“There’s a baseline level; we expect a certain number of cases,” she said. “That does not mean safe, it does not mean that it is not widespread, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it isn’t deadly.”

Dr. Silvera added that the numbers “certainly aren’t static.”

“We’re still seeing some pretty dramatic surges and then a falling of case rates, where we just came off of omicron with a huge surge and those case rates are now still dropping,” she said. “This is not endemic yet.”