Dr. Anthony Fauci said he is bullish on most states’ omicron cases peaking by the middle of next month.
Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that he is “as confident as you can be” about the highly contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus slowing by mid-February.
“Things are looking good,” he said. “We don’t want to get overconfident, but they look like they’re going in the right direction right now.”
“You never want to be overconfident when you’re dealing with this virus,” Fauci said, noting that the coronavirus has “surprised us in the past.”
When asked about the long-term outlook of Americans living with the coronavirus, Fauci said he hopes the level of infection will be below what is known as an “area of control.”
“Control means you’re not eliminating it, you’re not eradicating it, but it gets down to such a low level, that it’s essentially integrated into the general respiratory infections that we have learned to live with,” Fauci told ABC. “We’d like to get it down to that level where it doesn’t disrupt us in the sense of getting back to normality. That’s the best-case scenario.”