Dr. Anthony Fauci is in Washington, DC, for a meeting with President Joe Biden and other members of the White House COVID-19 Response Team.
The omicron variant of Covid-19 is likely to keep on increasing as it rapidly spreads across the globe, according to an infectious disease expert.
It goes up and down. Fauci said that the last weekly average was about 150,000.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. had reported more than 51 million total cases by Thursday. In December, the U.S. had more deaths from the disease than any other country.
The omicron variant took over as the dominant strain a week ago.
The strain has proven to be highly transmissible, but studies are showing it is less severe in terms of hospitalizations. Fauci stressed that now is not the time to get carried away.
Fauci said that if you have a lot of people with less severity, that might make the effect of having less severity less positive. Those who are unvaccinated are particularly worried. Those are the people who are most vulnerable when you have a virus that is very effective in getting to people and infecting them.
