Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC’s This Week that he is confident that most states will reach a peak in Omicron infections in mid-February. When asked how confident he was Fauci said, “I’m as confident as I can be, of course you never want to be over-confident with this virus because it’s surprised us in the past, but if you look at the patterns we’ve seen in South Africa and the UK, and Israel…they’ve peaked and started to come down, rather sharply. There are still some states, in the Southern states and Western states that continue to go up, but if the pattern follows the trend that we’re seeing in other places…I believe you will start to see a turnaround, in the entire country.”

Fauci gave what his become his standard advice for people to get vaccinated and boosted, mentioning specifically that boosting helps to dramatically reduce the prospect of serious disease outcomes.

Fauci mentioned that the Omicron variant overall seems to be less likely to cause severe disease than earlier Covid variants. Fauci’s overall argument is that a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity should result in Covid becoming part of the general collection of respiratory infections that modern humans have learned to live with. His comments are entirely consistent with predictions that future derivates of current Covid variants are likely to become more contagious, but cause less severe illness than current strains.