Dr. Anthony Fauci says spread of the Omicron variant will peak across the U.S. by the end of January and then begin to wane.
“I would imagine, given the size of our country and the diversity of vaccination versus not vaccination, that it likely will be more than a couple of weeks, probably by the end of January, I would think,” Fauci said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
While he added that “it’s tough to say” exactly when the variant will begin to wane, the doctor said Omicron cases in South Africa, where the variant was first discovered, rose fast then dropped. “It certainly peaked pretty quickly in South Africa,” Fauci said. “It went up almost vertically and turned around very quickly.”
Fauci also said the Omicron variant could help end the deadly pandemic. Studies indicate Omicron is less lethal than the Delta variant, so if it becomes the dominant strain, it would replace other variants that cause more severe infections.
“I would hope that’s the case,” Fauci said when asked about that, but “there’s no guarantee that that would happen. [But] if you have a very transmissible virus that replaces another virus, and [the replacement virus] has less of a degree of severity, that would be a positive outcome.”
Scientists at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban recently conducted a small study that found people infected with Omicron — and especially those who have been fully vaccinated — developed a higher immunity to Delta.
“The research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, involved 15 vaccinated and unvaccinated Omicron patients in South Africa, according to Bloomberg News, which noted that two were excluded because they didn’t detectably neutralize Omicron,” the New York Post reported. “The authors, led by Alex Sigal and Khadija Khan, found that while the neutralization of Omicron increased 14-fold over 14 days after the enrollment, there also was a 4.4-fold increase in neutralization of the Delta variant.”
“The increase in Delta variant neutralization in individuals infected with Omicron may result in decreased ability of Delta to re-infect those individuals,” the authors said, adding, the findings are “consistent with Omicron displacing the Delta variant, since it can elicit immunity which neutralizes making re-infection with Delta less likely.”
If Omicron can displace Delta to become the main variant, that could be big news because Omicron, while up to 70 times more contagious, seems far less likely to land sufferers in the hospital.
“If so, then the incidence of COVID-19 severe disease would be reduced and the infection may shift to become less disruptive to individuals and society,” the study said.
Researchers for a new study say Omicron appears to be milder than the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, leading to up to 80% fewer hospitalizations.
Of the people who contract the virus and are hospitalized, they’re also 70% less likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit or be put on a ventilator compared to those with Delta, the Daily Mail reported on the study led by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD).
“So even though cases of omicron were less likely to end up in hospital than cases of delta, it is not possible to say whether this is due to inherent differences in virulence or whether this is due to higher population immunity in November compared to earlier in the year,” Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, told the Mail.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected].
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Source: Dailywire
