Worst of US pandemic likely behind us but we can’t drop our guard, experts say

Vaccines and new antiviral drugs cause for optimism as deaths and cases fall but Americans urged to be careful amid variant threat

The number of new Covid cases and deaths in the United States has been in a steady decline since early September, prompting many infectious disease experts to conclude that the worst impacts of the pandemic in America are probably in the past.

But in the same breath, those experts also caution that it's not yet safe to abandon safeguards against the virus. That's because parts of the US population and much of the world remain unvaccinated, which could allow for outbreaks and dangerous new variants of the virus to emerge.