The US expert said that despite the record increase in infections and hospitalizations, the country is approaching the “threshold“ of living with Covid-19 as a controllable disease.
Speaking before the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on January 11, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top scientist and medical adviser to the US president, said the complete eradication of Covid-19 is unrealistic and “the Omicron variant, with an unprecedented and unusual level of infection, will eventually infect everyone”.
“We have no way of eradicating this virus, because of its ease of transmission, its tendency to mutate into new strains and the large number of unvaccinated people,” Fauci said.
According to Fauci, in the context of the Omicron infection rate “rising and then falling”, the US is expected to enter a new phase with “enough protection in the community, enough medicine to treat when anyone gets sick. infected or in a high-risk group, they are easily treated.”
“When we get to that level, there’s going to be a transition, and we’re probably standing at that threshold now,” Fauci said, adding that the US was still recording almost a million infections a day. Nearly 150,000 people are hospitalized and more than 1,200 people die every day, so it “hasn’t reached that level yet”.
The Omicron mutation has pushed the number of new Covid-19 cases in the US to a record high, more than the number of infections ever recorded in any country since the Covid-19 pandemic began more than 2 years ago. five.
More than 1.13 million people in the US were diagnosed with Covid-19 on January 10, a record high in the world. The previous world record was 1.03 million infections, recorded on January 3, also in the US. In some areas of the US, 90% of new infections are due to the Omicron strain.
On the same day of January 10, the US also recorded a record high number of hospital admissions for Covid-19, doubling in 3 weeks, reaching 135,500. The previous record was 132,051 recorded last January.
The number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the US has continuously increased since the end of December 2021 and doubled in the past 3 weeks when Omicron quickly surpassed Delta to become the dominant strain in the US. Many US states have recorded a record number of hospital admissions. The number of deaths from Covid-19 is also showing signs of increasing, with about 1,700 cases per day, but still lower than the peak of the epidemic early last year.
Although the Omicron strain is thought to cause less severe symptoms, health officials warn the spike in infections caused by Omicrons could overwhelm the health system.
Many hospitals in the US have had to suspend less important services to treat Covid-19 patients due to lack of staff. Even, many hospitals allow employees with Covid-19 with symptoms to go to work to cope with a serious shortage of manpower in the context of Omicron “spreading like wildfire”.
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced this week that it has begun production of a vaccine version against Omicron and several other strains of the spreading virus. The vaccine is expected to be released in March this year.
