With Concord Hospital dropping a mask mandate that began three years ago, New Hampshire seeing much lower COVID-19 hospitalization and death rates and the national public health emergency ending in a month, it feels like the pandemic is finally behind us.

But the virus is still around and “layered protection” starting with vaccination is still a good idea, say the state’s medical experts.

“I feel we’re at a stage where we have a responsibility, one to another, not to continue to spread the disease, particularly with the possibility of emergence of variants,” said Dr. Elizabeth Talbot, an infectious disease specialist affiliated with Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. “This is not just a cold.”

Talen and Dr. Benjamin Chan, the state epidemiologist, said in a webinar Thursday that people who do get COVID should look into getting doctors to approve treatment with the anti-viral drug Paxlovid rather than just riding it out. The drug has been shown to greatly reduce the risk of more severe symptoms leading to hospitalization, and seems like it can help reduce the chance of “long COVID,” a term for often debilitating conditions that for reasons still not well understood can linger for many months or longer in some patients.

“There’s a huge list of chronic conditions that put people at risk of more severe infection if they were to develop COVID 19 – those would likely all quality for Paxlovid treatment,” said Dr. Chan. “That is a reason to home-test. If you have COVID, people can get Paxlovid to prevent their infection from progressing to more severe disease.”

The webinar was sponsored by GoTruth NH, a public information program created in response to anti-vaccine misinformation. Titled “The Aftertimes,” it was a follow-up to a similar webinar in the fall, designed to indicate where the state is as far as the pandemic goes.

“We are at, we believe, one of the lowest levels of COVID-19 circulation that we’ve seen for the past year,” said Dr. Chan, pointing to continuing declines in hospitalization numbers and deaths related to the pandemic as well as lower trends of virus showing up in tested wastewater from Concord and other municipal sewage systems.

Among the webinar topics were the status of vaccine boosters. As Chan and Talbot described it, everybody over the age of 6 months should get their primary vaccine and the updated bivalent booster that was issued last year, sometimes called the Omicron booster after a variant in circulation at the time.

Chan said that while New Hampshire has a relatively good take-up rate in basic vaccines – roughly 75% of people over 18 have completed the primary series, he said – the update in boosters is much lower. Among people aged 18 to 64, he said, only about 20% have gotten the booster shot.

There is no need for most people to get a second booster at this time, Chan said, although it is possible that the CDC will recommend soon that second boosters be made available to certain people who are more vulnerable. That is unlikely to be a widespread recommendation, however.

Chan said he expected the booster would eventually become an annual shot targeting any variants of the SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID-19 – similar to the annual flu shot that has long been offered.

“The number of tools in the toolbox has expanded over the pandemic. Vaccines absolutely are one of the critical and necessary tools to transition out of emergency phase … we also have therapeutics to treat people who have COVID. … Those pharmaceutical interventions have been critical to allow us to move away from the masking and social-distancing guidance,” he said.

However, wearing masks when appropriate, such as indoors in crowds or near people who are at risk, washing hands and maintaining social distance is still a good idea, they said.

“It would be very hard for me to imagine giving somebody else COVID-19,” said Dr. Talbot.

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