Omicron will ‘find everybody,’ US on ‘threshold’ of living with COVID: Fauci

The omicron variant of coronavirus will ultimately find ‘just about everybody’, White House’s top pandemic advisor Dr Anthony Fauci said Tuesday.

Speaking to the senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, J Stephen Morrison, Fauci said, “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody.”

Also Read | Omicron to become dominant coronavirus variant in Americas shortly: PAHO

But people who are vaccinated will fare better. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”

Further, he said that it is highly unlikely that the virus will be completely eradicated. 

“There’s no way we’re going to eradicate this” virus, he said, considering its high transmissibility and the number of unvaccinated people. 

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But “as Omicron goes up and down,” the country will hopefully enter a new phase “where there’ll be enough protection in (the) community, enough drugs available so that when someone does get infected and is in a high risk group, it will be very easy to treat that person,” he said, according to news agency AFP. 

On whether the pandemic has entered a new stage, Fauci said that the United States is approaching the “threshold” of transitioning to living with the coronavirus as a manageable disease.

However, that would depend significantly on vaccination numbers as well as treatments for COVID.

“When we get there, there’s that transition, and we may be on the threshold of that right now.”

Also Read | Amid global COVID surge, WHO warns against treating omicron like the flu

But as the country recorded almost a million infections in a single day, and hospitalisations peaked to over 145,900 on Tuesday, he said that threshold hadn’t been reached yet.

Meanwhile, the health agency Pan American Health Organization said Wednesday it expects omicron to become the predominant coronavirus variant in the Americas in the coming weeks, where confirmed cases have reached record levels.

It added that although healthcare systems face challenges with rising hospitalizations, vaccination has meant that COVID-19 deaths have not increased at the same rate as infections.

Also Read | WHO: Half of Europe will be infected by omicron in the coming weeks

“While delta is still causing new infections in the Americas, based on current trends, omicron is on track to become the dominant strain in our region,” Carissa Etienne, director of the agency known by its initials PAHO, said during an online news conference.

The omicron variant caused 98.3% of new coronavirus cases in the US last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(With inputs from AFP)