RE: US Covid response press briefing22 Jan 2022 10:28
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Q First, many people who are vaccinated and have nonetheless gotten infected with Omicron want to know if they are protected against Omicron. And if so, for how long?
And second, Jeff, you talked about COVID — we’re heading to a place where COVID won’t be a constant crisis but something we protect against and treat. And I’m wondering — I guess this is for both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky — what is your best guess about what the next six months will look like with respect to COVID-19? And if you don’t know, could you please lay out several possible different scenarios? I think many Americans want to know what to expect.
DR. FAUCI: Well, in answer to your last question, Sheryl: We don’t know. But what one does when you have a situation where you don’t know — because we have also had the experience, as you know, of the unpredictability of things like what happened with Delta and what happened with Omicron — so you put together a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario.
What’s the best-case scenario? The best-case scenario is that the description that Dr. Walensky just gave us about the diminution in cases in many regions of the country will continue to go down to a baseline level that is a level of what we call “adequate control.”
Namely, it’s not disruptive of what we do. And the combination of vaccinated and boosted people and the protection afforded by prior infection will have a level of protection in the community so that you won’t get the situation where there’s enough activity which leads to hospitalizations, deaths, and stressing the healthcare system — which, in fact, answers a bit of your first question, Sheryl, about: What about Omicron? If you get infected, can you get infected again?
Sure, there are reinfections. But it is unlikely that if you mount a good immune response — at least over a period of several months — it is extremely unlikely that you will be re-infected with the same variant.
We’ve seen reinfections, but those are mostly in people who’ve been infected with Alpha, who then wind up getting re-infected with Beta or re-infected with Omicron. That’s the best-case scenario.
The worst-case scenario is something we have to be prepared for, and that is: We do get down to a level that we would say would be “adequate control,” but we’re faced with another surprise with a variant that’s so different that it eludes the accumulation of the immune protection that we’ve gotten from vaccinations and from prior infections.
I hope that doesn’t happen. I can’t give you a statistic of what the chance of that happen, but we have to be prepared for it. So, we hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
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