Fauci warns against complacency about the virus that will fill hospitals

Hospitals may still be overwhelmed by the volume of cases, President Biden’s chief medical adviser said Sunday. “This Week,” Anthony Fauci told ABC Washington’s chief correspondent, Jonathan Carle.

“So if you have lots and lots of people with a lower risk level, that might offset the positive effect of being less severe,” said Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Preliminary data from Scotland shows Omicron “is associated with a two-thirds reduction in the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 compared to Delta.” However, the same study showed that people who had already contracted the COVID virus were ten times more likely than delta to get infected.

CNN reported that new daily infections with omicrons in the United States exceeded those in the delta wave. US airlines canceled nearly 1,900 flights over the weekend due to staff shortages linked to an increase in cases.

Meanwhile, China recorded the largest number of local infections since January, and France recorded a daily record of more than 100,000 new cases. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of cases worldwide has exceeded 279 million.

Fauci said the Biden administration is focused on making sure “we don’t get an abundance of hospitals, especially in those areas where there are a higher proportion of people who are not immunized.”

Fauci’s comments come as the administration faces criticism over the lack of rapid at-home testing. Last week, Biden said he used the powers of war to push production of another billion test kits.

This Sunday, in an interview on ABC’s This Week, the expert claimed that the problem was due to high demand as a result of the spread of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, as well as the trips and family gatherings typical of the Christmas season.

But Fauci stressed that the production of rapid tests has improved, and he stressed that the situation may be more appropriate next January, when the president promised to distribute 500 million free tests to detect new infections, a measure considered by some specialists as too late.

The decision to provide evidence comes at a complex time for Biden, who has made good on his promise to curb the pandemic, and now Covid-19 kills more than 1,000 Americans every day and is spreading with astonishing speed.

The United States is the country with the worst numbers globally since March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and since then more than 805,000 people have died here.

The average number of cases has risen to more than 190,000 per day and only 62 percent of the population has a full vaccination plan, according to a New York Times tally.

States like Florida and New York have reported a record number of infections recently.