Welcome to the Sunday edition of CNN Five Things. I'm David Rhine.

With everything going on in Ukraine right now, it's understandable that some stories might slip by you. I mean,

Major League Baseball canceled the start of its regular season last week because of a

labor dispute, and it was probably like the 50th most important story on that day alone.

But there is something I want to focus on today,

something that has not gone away despite all the other news out there, COVID-19.

Because of the progress we've made, because of your resilience and the tools that we have

been provided by this Congress. Tonight I can say we're moving forward safely back

to a more normal routines.

Over the past week, the federal government officially signaled something you may have been feeling for a while.

That according to them, we are entering a new phase of the pandemic.

I want to spend five minutes with CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen to break this down because

Elizabeth I feel like I've heard we're in a new phase of the pandemic like 20 times over the past two years

What exactly is different here about this moment? I know doesn't it feel that way David it feels like

Let's see if I go chronologically in the summer of 2020 it felt like things were getting better it felt like in sort of May of

2021 it felt like things were getting better and just recently

sort of October November before omicron hit but here's why this one feels

different this one I think feels different because some time has passed and the cases have been coming down and we haven't had some horrific new variant come on the scene recently.

So that I think is giving people hope because that really is what could

ruin this is to have some horrible new variant come on down. But David I want to say one thing. I know that we're all sick of COVID.

I know that we want to think of it as being over, but we still have about 53,000 hospitalizations a day.

If we take a look at deaths per day, now it's around 1700,

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