BOSTON — A Boston hospital reached a major milestone Tuesday, reporting zero COVID-19 inpatients for the first time since the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic.
As of 6:45 a.m., Tufts Medical Center was treating zero COVID-positive patients for the first time since March 21, 2020, a hospital spokesperson said in a statement.
“This is a milestone that we didn’t know when or if we would ever see,” Shira Doron, Chief Infection Control Officer for Tufts Medicine, told Boston 25.
Doron noted that “widespread community immunity” and vaccinations have contributed to the dwindling COVID-19 case counts.
She did express caution when asked if the pandemic is officially behind us.
“COVID is not going away, but we are in such a much better place than we were in 2020,” Doron explained. “We are going to see ups and downs, waves of infections, hopefully settling out into a seasonal pattern in the winter that we can predict better.”
While hospitalizations are down in a big way in 2023, Doron said that a new COVID variant could emerge and drive the numbers back up.
In the beginning stages of the pandemic, tens of thousands of Americans lost their lives to COVID-19 and hundreds of thousands of cases, at times, were reported on a daily basis.
Since the start of the pandemic, Massachusetts has reported more than two million cases and more than 21,000 deaths, data shows.
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