RELATED: If You Have These 2 Symptoms, Get Tested for Omicron, Experts Warn. During a Jan. 7 interview with NBC-affiliate News 4 New York, Fauci discussed the ongoing Omicron surge and how he expects the situation to play out in the coming weeks. He said he is hopeful that the Omicron wave will break by the end of this month.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb “I would hope—I can’t predict accurately, because no one can‚ but I would hope that by the time we get to the fourth week in January—end of the third week, beginning of the fourth week—that we will start to see this coming down,” Fauci said. RELATED: This Strange Symptom at Night Could Mean You Have Omicron, Doctors Warn. Fauci previously suggested that Omicron’s surge might reach its peak near the end of January. During a Dec. 29 interview on CNBC’s Closing Bell, he said that it will likely only take just over a “couple of weeks” for the U.S. to bypass the variant’s spike, “given the size of [the] country and the diversity of vaccination versus not vaccination.” Fauci based that prediction on what was seen in South Africa, where the Omicron variant first surged. “It certainly peaked pretty quickly in South Africa,” he told CNBC. “It went up almost vertically and turned around very quickly.” Cases will continue to go up until the wave breaks, however. According to Fauci, it’s likely that the U.S. will start regularly hitting one million new infections a day over the next week or so before Omicron hits its peak. The country hit this record for the first time ever on Jan. 3, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. “It’s still surging upward. We had about 745,000 cases yesterday. I would not be surprised at all if we go over a million cases per day,” Fauci told News 4. RELATED: For more up-to-date information, sign up for our daily newsletter. Research is showing that the new variant might be less severe than previous version of the virus. Fauci confirmed that “multiple sources of now-preliminary data indicate a decrease of severity with Omicron” during a White House press briefing on Jan. 5. According to the infectious disease expert, recent animal studies have shown that this iteration of COVID does not attack the lungs as severely as Delta or prior strains. But that doesn’t mean rising Omicron cases are not going to have disastrous consequences for the U.S. “We should not be complacent,” Fauci warned during the briefing. The Omicron surge “could still stress our hospital system because a certain proportion of a large volume of cases, no matter what, are going to be severe.” RELATED: Dr. Fauci Says This Is How the Pandemic Will End Now.
