Health experts are hoping to shore up a pandemic-fatigued public as the COVID-19 health crisis continues to pose a threat during the final months of 2021.  

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently shared with ABC News what she believes the U.S. will look like once the coronavirus pandemic reaches its conclusion.

Walensky anticipates one of the key signs the nation is exiting the pandemic will be when hospitals are no longer filled to the brim with COVID-19 patients.

She said a second sign that the health crisis is ending will be reflected in a significant decrease in the number of daily deaths.

"We've gotten pretty cavalier about 1,100 deaths a day," Walensky told ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton in a rare in-person interview from CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

"That's an extraordinary amount of deaths in a single day from this disease," Walensky said. "We can't -- I can't -- be in a position where that is OK."

Public health experts are closely monitoring the number of deaths and hospitalizations in the U.S., as they feel these have become a more reliable benchmark for progress than overall cases.

Though the concept of herd immunity - the idea that the virus will one day be stopped when enough people are immune- was once touted by scientists, they seem to have now abandoned this theory.

Instead, scientists agree that even in a world where nearly everyone is vaccinated, COVID-19 cases would still occur.

But many researchers feel this does not mean social distancing and masks will be a permanent part of life. 

"Masks are for now, they're not forever," Walensky said. "We have to find a way to be done with them."

A number of health experts are comparing the virus to the seasonal flu, saying that much like the flu, the virus would still appear and some people would still be hospitalized, some would even die, but at a dramatically lesser rate than the daily number of COVID deaths reflected in current statistics.

According to the CDC, at this time, roughly 65% of eligible Americans are fully vaccinated.

Experts continue to say that the more people who get vaccinated, the more deaths and hospitalizations are driven down.