The Omicron blizzard that continues to sweep across America will find just about everybody this winter.
“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “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.”
Those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” Fauci added. Across the United States, at least one in five eligible Americans — roughly 65 million people– are not vaccinated against Covid-19. Only 23% who are fully vaccinated are also boosted, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on January 18 2022, “I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get Covid… and what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”
Dr. Fauci pointed out that there are 5 stages of the pandemic and we are still in phase 1. He cautioned against thinking we are further along than we actually are. The first phase of the pandemic—or the “The truly pandemic,” according to Fauci—is “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now.”
The following four steps are deceleration, control, elimination, and finally eradication.
Deceleration will be a slowdown in the number of newly confirmed cases.
Control refers to endemicity. That means that COVID-19 would become integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases we commonly experience, like the flu or the common cold.
Elimination comes when the virus still exists in the world but it has been eradicated from certain regions or countries.
Eradication will be nearly impossible to reach.