Pandemic: occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population; characterized by very widespread growth or extent
Endemic: characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment; a disease or outbreak of disease that is typically present in a particular region or population : an endemic disease
COVID doesn't even really qualify as endemic based on the dictionary definition, but it's certainly not a pandemic.
How does it not fit the dictionary definition of pandemic?
17,310 admissions, down 10.3% week over week
2.1% of deaths, down 8.7% WOW
1.5% of ED visits, down 14.6% WOW
7.4% of tests are positive, down 0.9% WOW
None of those numbers indicate growth. None of those numbers indicate a significant proportion of the population. I'll give you geography, but that's also characteristic of an endemic illness - distributed across a large geographic region among a small percentage of the population with relatively little impact.
If your argument is that these numbers are not enough for "very widespread extent", then are you saying it was never a pandemic to begin with?
And you already said it was endemic. Are you arguing that a pandemic needs bigger numbers than that?
98.5% of ED visits are for something else. What would that number have been in 2020 or 2021?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
The severity has dropped more than the prevalence.
Hospitalizations suggest that in the US the peak in Jan 2024 was around 80% as big as Jan 2023. If that's accurate, then Jan 2024 had more cases per day than most of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021. That's a lot of extent. There had been 120 thousand cases in the entire world when pandemic was originally declared, and the US is currently doing a multiple of that each week.