World leaders need to keep a watchful eye on whether the new Omicron variant BA.2 is causing more people to be admitted to hospital, chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden has said. Dr Anthony Fauci said Covid-19 is “really unpredictable” and said leaders have to “look at the balance” when it comes to considering future restrictions.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme on BBC, Dr Fauci said it is “quite correct” to be seeing Covid-19 cases increase around the world in light of the strain’s greater transmissibility and the relaxation of restrictions, while immunity tends to wane. He said: “The important thing that we need to keep an eye on is that it doesn’t appear to be associated with any increase in severity in the form of increased hospitalisations.”
Asked if the world no longer needs to worry about coronavirus, he said: “No, I’m not saying that at all. Whenever you get any surges, particularly of this virus that has given us so much trouble, I would never say don’t worry about it.
“What I’m saying is that we have to observe it carefully, we have seen this uptick and I believe there is an explanation for the uptick.”
Asked about future restrictions, the US president’s chief medical adviser told the BBC One programme: “I don’t want to use the word lockdown as that has a charged element to it but I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections right now. We need to be prepared for the possibility that we would have another variant that would come along and then things change and if we do get a variance that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalisation, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot towards going back at least temporarily, to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoor.”
On lockdowns, he said: “Obviously, when you do have that kind of restriction on society, there are unintended negative consequences particularly in children who are not allowed to go to school, in the psychological and mental health aspects it has on children, in the economic stress that it puts on society, in general, and on individual families. Obviously those are negative consequences that are unintended – One has to look at the balance of lives saved and hospitalisations avoided.
On what next winter will look like, Dr Fauci said: “I think it’s really unpredictable. This virus has fooled us so often. We really don’t know and I think anyone who says they’re going to predict with any certainty what’s going to happen in the winter I think, is a bit of a stretch.”
