Fauci: Focus On Hospital Data, Not Cases, For Omicron

The US government’s top medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has joined a growing body of experts who say hospitalisation figures are a better guide to the severity of the Omicron coronavirus variant than the traditional case count of new infections.

- Richard Luscombe

Referring to the rise in Omicron infections in the US as a “tsunami”, Fauci also cautioned the public not to be fooled by preliminary data suggesting the variant lacks the severity of earlier Covid-19 variants.

“You have a virus that looks like it might be less severe, at least from data we’ve gathered from South Africa, the UK, and even some from preliminary data from here in the US,” he told CNN’s political talk show State of the Union.

“ So many people are getting infected that … the total amount of people that will require hospitalisation might be up,” he said. “We can’t be complacent in these reports. We’re still going to get a lot of hospitalisations.”

On ABC’s This Week, Fauci was asked if it was time to focus less on the case count, which has soared close to 500,000 reported new daily infections in the US. Experts have questioned if such figures cause unnecessary worry, and suggested deaths and hospitalisation data could better inform mitigation efforts.