No way to eradicate infection, but US on ‘threshold’ of transitioning to living with COVID: Anthony Fauci

By Team Newsable | First Published Jan 12, 2022, 8:59 AM IST

Official data showed there are currently 145,982 Covid hospitalizations, even though a significant per cent are thought to be hospitalized "with" the disease rather than because of it.

Despite the US facing soaring infections and record hospitalisations associated with Covid-19, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert said Tuesday the country is approaching the “threshold” of transitioning to living with the coronavirus as a manageable disease.

The top US scientist told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that eliminating Covid would be unrealistic and that “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody.”

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“There’s no way we're going to eradicate this” virus, he said, given its contagiousness, its propensity to mutate into new variants and the large pool of unvaccinated people.

While vaccination is still effective against severe outcomes, it is losing its effectiveness against the infection”

However, “as Omicron goes up and down,” the country will hopefully enter a new phase “where there'll be enough protection in (the) community, enough drugs available so that when someone does get infected and is in a high-risk group, it will be very easy to treat that person,” said Fauci.

“When we get there, there's that transition, and we may be on the threshold of that right now,” he said, while also stressing that with the country currently recording almost a million infections a day, nearly 150,000 people in hospital and more than 1,200 daily deaths, “we’re not at that point.”

Despite the fact that a significant portion of Covid cases are thought to be hospitalized ‘with’ the disease rather than for the disease, official data showed 145,982 hospitalisations for the disease.

President Joe Biden's top officials, including his chief medical advisor Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walenksy and acting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Janet Woodcock were summoned to testify before the Senate about the pandemic.

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