Dr. Fauci warns that it does not matter which omicron is milder if it infects many more people

Dcotor Anthony Fauci is clear: Americans need to remain vigilant with the omicron variant despite indications that its symptoms may be less severe than those of delta or the parent strain, because the sheer volume of cases can still overwhelm patients. hospitals, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday.

“The reason we don’t want to be complacent is that such a high number of new infections can counter a real decrease in severity,” Anthony Fauci told ABC Washington’s chief correspondent Jonathan Karl on “This Week.” “So if we have many, many, many more people infected, even if the average severity of the cases goes down, there will be the same number of seriously ill patients admitted,” said Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. In the end, 1% of seriously ill patients out of a million infected is the same figure as 0.1% of 10 million cases.

Preliminary data from Scotland shows that omicron “is associated with a two-thirds reduction in covid-19 risk compared to delta.” However, the same study showed that it was 10 times more likely than delta to infect people who had already had a previous strain of covid.

New daily omicron infections in the United States have surpassed those of the delta wave, CNN reported. US airlines canceled nearly 1,900 flights for the holiday weekend due to staff shortages due to the sharp increase in cases. Meanwhile, China reported the highest number of local infections since January and France posted a daily record of more than 100,000 new cases. Since the start of the pandemic, cases worldwide have exceeded 279 million.

The Biden Administration is focused on making sure that “we do not receive an excess of patients in hospitals, particularly in those regions where there is a higher proportion of unvaccinated people,” Fauci said. And last week, Biden gave orders to companies to accelerate the production of 1 billion antigen tests, amid a shortage of tests.