Fauci: US ‘safe’ Omicron will soon peak even as hospitals struggle | anthony fauci

US officials are confident that most states will soon reach and exceed a peak in cases of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, even as hospitals struggle to cope with the current surge, Joe Biden’s top medical adviser said on Sunday.

“I believe [we’re] as safe as you can be,” Anthony Fauci told ABC’s This Week. “You never want to be overconfident when dealing with this virus, because it has certainly surprised us in the past.

“But if you look at the patterns that we have seen in South Africa, in the UK and in Israel, and in the [US] Northeast and New England and upper Midwestern states, have peaked and started to decline quite sharply.

“There are still some southern states and western states that are continuing to go up, but if the pattern follows the trend that we’re seeing elsewhere…I think you’re going to start to see a shift across the country.”

Fauci also predicted “a little bit more pain and suffering with hospitalizations in those areas of the country that haven’t been fully vaccinated or haven’t had boosters.”

But, he said, “we do know, and this is the recent data that has come out, that even with Omicron, boosting makes a big difference in protecting against hospitalization and serious outcomes.

“So things are looking good. We don’t want to trust ourselves too much. But it looks like they’re going in the right direction at the moment.”

More than 865,000 people have died in the US during the coronavirus pandemic.

Fauci said that Omicron “appears” to be causing less severe disease than other variants, though “it is by no means exempt from making people sick and putting them in the hospital, particularly those who are not vaccinated.”

That relative lack of severity, he said, helped efforts to get Covid under control.

“Control means you’re not eliminating it, you’re not eradicating it, but it’s getting down to such a low level that it’s essentially integrated into the general respiratory infections that we’ve learned to live with.

“I mean, we wish they weren’t around, but they are there. But they do not alter society. They do not create a fear of serious results that are extensive. You will always get some serious results with respiratory infections. Even in a good pre-Covid era, you’ve always had that. We would like it to go down to that level where it doesn’t disturb us, in the sense of returning to a degree of normality.

“That’s the best case scenario. We have to be prepared for the worst case scenario. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but we have to be prepared, which is, I think, that we’re going to have another variant again that has characteristics that would be problematic, like a high degree of transmissibility or a high degree of virulence. .”

According According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 75.5% of eligible Americans have received at least one dose of vaccination and 63.3% are considered fully vaccinated. However, only 39.7% (or 53.2% of those eligible) have received booster shots.

More boosters might be recommended, Fauci said, once it is known how long a third injection of an mRNA vaccine or a second of a single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine will last.

“Certainly, you will see antibody levels go down,” he said. “That’s natural, but… it’s quite conceivable, and I hope it’s true, that the third shot booster would provide much longer lasting protection. We are following it very closely.

“And when I say protection, I mean protection against serious diseases. You’ll see breakthrough infections like we’ve seen now, even in boosted people, but for the most part, they’re mild or even asymptomatic.”

Fauci also said Covid testing supplies still needed to be improved. Omicron’s rise has coincided with problems the Biden administration is trying to resolve, including offering free at-home tests.

Fauci was asked if it was safe to send children to school without a mask, in states where mandates are being lifted, often due to political pressure.

“We want children to go back to school,” he said. “And the way you do that, you… surround kids with people who are vaccinated. For children who are eligible to be vaccinated, vaccinate them and provide masks… as well as ventilation to make sure you can get a respiratory infection at its lowest level of infectivity.

“All of those things go together and the masking is part of that.”