fauci: Omicron seems less severe, but can’t let our guard down: Fauci

WASHINGTON: Top health officials from the US, India, and world bodies are homing into the same page on the current status of the pandemic: The Omicron will infect “just about everybody”, but those who are vaccinated will “very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well”, avoiding hospitalisation and death. “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” US expert Anthony Fauci said in a talk at a Washington DC thinktank.
That does not mean letting down one’s guard or, as some health professionals have suggested, willfully getting infected. “Those who are still unvaccinated are going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this. And although it is less severe on a case-by-case basis, when you quantitatively have so many people who are infected, a fraction of them are going to die,” Fauci warned.
Although Omicron is widely accepted now as being relatively mild, continued mandates and protocols to contain its spread is causing huge worker shortages across US, particularly in education and health sector. In some school districts, parents are being asked to substitute for teachers, even as millions of fearful parents are keeping kids home, disrupting their own work schedule. Many families are also anxiously awaiting a vaccine for kids aged 6 months to five years, the only demographic yet to get a shot.