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Dr. Anthony Fauci has some good news: The United States is on its way to exiting the "full-blown" pandemic phase of COVID-19. Fauci, who is President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, said the U.S. is heading in a positive direction due to vaccination rates, treatments, and prior infections making the virus more manageable as year three of the pandemic plays out. "As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated. There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus," Fauci said in a Financial Times interview published Tuesday. (Adcox, 2/8)

As omicron numbers drop at Denver Health, Dr. Anuj Mehta is reminded of the scene in the 1980 comedy “The Blues Brothers” when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd pile out of a battered car after a police chase. Suddenly, all the doors pop off the hinges, the front wheels fall off and smoke pours from the engine. “And that’s my fear,” said Mehta, a pulmonary and critical care physician. “I’m worried that as soon as we stop, everything’s just going to fall apart.” (Hollingsworth and Kolpack, 2/8)

You might get word soon about a surgery you'd planned that was put on hold because of the latest wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations. Surgeries that were booked, then delayed because of hospital resources and staffing during the onslaught are beginning to be rescheduled in the Cincinnati area. Officials at some hospitals confirm that they're back to typical scheduling of procedures, or they're rescheduling surgeries that were put on hold in January. Others continue to evaluate surgeries on a case-by-case basis. The decision comes as cases in the region continue to fall. (Demio, 2/8)

Though considered milder than other coronavirus variants, omicron has infected so many people that it has driven the number of daily deaths beyond where it was last spring, before vaccines were widely available, according to Washington Post data. Omicron has been particularly lethal to people over 75, the unvaccinated and the medically vulnerable, according to doctors and public health officials. The soaring death toll also illustrates why experts pleaded with the public to beware of the highly contagious variant even though it is less virulent than others. (Nirappil and Keating, 2/8)

Standing in the loading dock outside the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau on a recent morning, Sgt. Erik Bordi took in a grim scene: five biohazard cans, two refrigeration containers stacked with human remains, a gurney ready to load in a truck. He pondered the day’s work ahead. More than 100 bodies sat in coolers at the bureau, and staff had 21 autopsies to perform by the end of the day. A growing backlog of bodies awaiting autopsies has reached a critical point in Alameda County, making it more difficult to close cases amid a sharp rise in COVID-19 deaths, a regional overdose crisis and surging homicides in Oakland. (Swan, 2/8)

Research has reportedly identified a spike in cases of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or "broken heart syndrome," over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Experts said the potentially fatal stress-induced heart condition is disproportionately affecting women. "I don't know how much we can really blame COVID, or how much of this is that we're just recognizing more of it," Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, told "Good Morning America" on Monday. "But, heart disease is the leading killer of women and all ages, including teenagers, midlife women and older women. This is just a component of that major killer. So, it's really something that needs to be addressed." (Musto, 2/8)

With omicron, the sheer number of cases was completely unmanageable for contact tracing programs in many places. In Fulton County, Ga., chief epidemiologist Fazle Khan says, they have 130 people on their contact tracing team – as many as they've ever had. It still hasn't been enough. "We ended up – in Fulton County alone in this omicron surge – with more than 44,000 cases that have not been investigated," Khan says. In Maryland, during the omicron surge, "we really were only able to reach out to 11% or 12% of the cases," says Marcia Pearlowitz, chief of the Maryland Department of Health's contact tracing unit. Before omicron, they had reached 76% of residents on average, she says, even during previous surges. (Simmons-Duffin, 2/8)

After contracting Covid-19 in December 2020, Anne, a 61-year-old nurse in Boston, still doesn’t feel like her old self. She tires easily and has to meticulously record everything she has to do each day so she doesn’t forget. She’s more irritable than she used to be, and has trouble focusing for extended periods of time. Anne, who asked for her last name to be withheld to protect her privacy, is one of the estimated tens of millions of Americans with post-acute Covid syndrome, or long Covid, as it’s known colloquially. It exacts an often debilitating physical and mental toll on patients, and doctors and scientists are working tirelessly to find treatments for its myriad symptoms, such as brain fog and extreme fatigue. What’s less talked about are the financial costs patients incur from months of doctor visits, prescriptions, procedures, lost work, mental and physical therapy and more. (Adamczyk, 2/8)