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The chief medical adviser to President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned the US could potentially experience the 5^th wave of coronavirus infections. He said the increasing number of Americans who are vaccinated against the virus and receive their booster shots could prevent its severity. Fauci said, “We certainly have the potential to go into a 5^th wave. And the 5^th wave, or the magnitude of any increase, if you want to call it that it will turn into a wave, will really be dependent upon what we do in the next few weeks to a couple of months”. He said there are 62 million eligible Americans to be vaccinated against Covid-19 but haven’t yet gotten their shots. However, millions more who were immunized at least 6 months ago and are now looking their immunity against the virus wane, precipitating the need for booster shots.

Fauci said, “If we have a combination of getting as many people as we can get vaccinated as possible who have not yet gotten vaccinated, add on to it the children who are now eligible, the 5 to 11, there’s 28 million of those, and getting the many, many people now, 70% of the entire population of adults has been vaccinated, about 80% has been vaccinated. If we do that successfully in a very intensive way, we can mitigate any increase”. Americans are currently experiencing an uptick in the number of Covid-19 infections, up from roughly 70,000 per day. Fauci said raising the rates of Americans who get vaccinated and boosted could stem the effects of another wave of the pandemic. He said, “If we now do what I’m talking about in an intense way, we may be able to blunt that”.

Dr. Fauci added, “If we don’t do it successfully, it is certainly conceivable and maybe likely that we will see another bit of a surge. How bad it gets is dependent upon us and how we mitigate”. His comments just came before the world started scrambling to contain a new coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa, named Omicron by the World Health Organization. Moreover, concerns about the latest strain and its transmissibility prompted several countries, including the US, to restrict travel from southern Africa. CDC also confirmed that no cases of the Omicron variant have been identified in the US to date. The US also announced travel restrictions from 8 countries in the region starting from Monday, November 29, 2021. President Biden also said the emergence of the Omicron variant underscores the need for vaccinated Americans to get their boosters, and unvaccinated Americans to get their shots.