‘Most people are going to get Covid’: Fauci and FDA chief admit Omicron will sweep US

Top doctors are warning that most people in the United States are eventually going to get infected with Covid-19 – as the Omicron variant continues to spread rapidly.

A record number of daily Covid-19 infections were reported earlier this week, as the hospitalization rate also spiked massively.

On Monday alone, 132,646 people were admitted due to the virus, a new daily record that was broken again on Tuesday - as per Reuters.

On Tuesday, US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr Janet Woodcock faced questions from Senators, where she was quizzed on whether the US should change course in light of the Omicron surge. Ms Woodcock was steadfast in her response, although she did make one crucial admission following a question from Sen. Mike Braun.

“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get Covid,” Ms Woodcock said at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing.

“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.”

Along similar lines, Dr Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to the Biden Administration, recently explained how tricky it truly is to prevent the spread of the Omicron variant.

Follow live updates on Fauci’s Senate testimony

However, he did also highlight the important role vaccines have played in helping to lower variant-related hospitalization rates.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (via CNN).

“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.”

By contrast, those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” he added.

Across the US, around 65 million eligible people remain unvaccinated, while only 23 per cent are fully vaxxed and boosted.

The United States has averaged more than 754,200 new Covid-19 cases daily over the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

That’s roughly three times last winter’s peak average (251,987 on January 11, 2021), and 4.5 times the peak from last September’s Delta-driven surge.