“The pandemic is over,” Biden said. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.”

The car show was held at a Motor City convention center following a three-year pause due to COVID-19, and as Biden walked down the aisles of vehicles he cited the show as proof that the United States was out of the pandemic.

“If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing and I think this is a perfect example of it,” he said.

The comment comes more than two and a half years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, which is a global outbreak of a disease, on March 11, 2020.

On Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters during a press briefing that at 11,000 deaths, the number of weekly reported fatalities to the virus was at its lowest since he declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” he said. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”