Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, September 20th. I'm Nile Boone. Here's

what you need to know today. A new spotlight on who gets sick pay in America. Plus, the

murder conviction that helped make podcasts popular overturned. But first, is COVID finally

transitioning from a pandemic to just a problem? That's today's one big thing.

The pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in

pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing.

That's President Biden in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday. The White House

is still asking Congress for an additional $22.4 billion to keep funding the fight against

COVID. The World Health Organization Director General says the end of the pandemic is quote

insight and quote, but that we're not there yet. And in the US, nearly 3,000 people died

from COVID in the past week. So how close are we really to the end of this pandemic? And

what effect does the president's message have? Kaiser Health News' chief Washington correspondent

Julie Robiner is with us now to talk about this. Hey, Julie. I know. So let's just start

with what President Biden said about the pandemic being over.

Well, I think he was careful to try to couch it in a way. You know, he went on to say,

we still have problems with COVID. Somebody I can't remember who forgive me tweeted that we don't

have a good transition from pandemic to problem. And I think this may be a wording problem

more than anything else. I mean, I think in some ways, he's right. The emergency part is over,

although the public health emergency part is not over. So you got to be careful with your semantics

here. Right. What are public health officials saying about the state of the pandemic?

So the spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services was forced to sort of come in

behind the president. And she tweeted that on this was Monday afternoon, the COVID public health

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