The United States can "move forward safely" into a less disruptive phase of the pandemic, a maskless US President Joe Biden said in his first
State of the Union address Tuesday night, in which he outlined his plan to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Thanks to the progress we have made this past year, Covid-19 need no longer control our lives," Biden
said as he acknowledged that Americans are "tired, frustrated, and exhausted" with the pandemic.
Covid-19 cases are falling in the US, but numbers are still very high. More than 1,600 people are dying of the virus every day, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) seven-day average of new deaths, as the US closes in on the milestone of one million total Covid-19-related deaths.
Despite that, Biden highlighted the CDC's recently updated mask guidelines, which show that "most Americans in most of the country can now be mask free,"
CNN's Maegan Vazquez reports.