The rate of new coronavirus cases in the United States is “going in the right direction,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said on Sunday, as cases along the East Coast fall sharply.
Pointing to other countries that have already experienced sharp drops in cases after facing a flood of infections due to the omicron variant, Fauci, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” said “things are looking good.” Still, he cautioned that the virus “has certainly surprised us in the past,” and that the South and West will lag in declines, as their outbreaks started later than in the East.
New coronavirus cases have fallen 12 percent in the United States in the past week, based on a 7-day average, according to a Washington Post tracker. Declines have been even sharper in Washington, D.C. — where the decline is the steepest in the country with new cases falling by 55 percent on a weekly average — New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Covid-19 hospitalizations, which lag slightly behind increases in cases, are also starting to fall, while covid-19 deaths, which lag days to weeks behind outbreaks, are still increasing nationally.
Fauci said he was hopeful that in “the next weeks to month or so” the country would see a low enough level of contagion that the coronavirus would be “essentially integrated into the general respiratory infections that we have learned to live with,” allowing society to carry on somewhat normally. The World Health Organization’s Europe director, Hans Kluge, has expressed similar optimism for Europe, telling the Agence France-Presse that “it’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame.”
