Can you get infected with Omicron twice? White House medical adviser answers
Dr Anthony Fauci said cases of reinfections have occurred mostly in people who fell ill with one variant and then later contracted a different variant.
Top US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci on Friday said it is extremely unlikely for people to get re-infected with the Omicron variant of coronavirus for at least several months. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked during a press briefing whether vaccinated people who got infected with Omicron are protected against reinfection from the new variant of concern.
“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,” the top immunologist said.
Fauci stressed that the unpredictable nature of the variants of concerns has prompted authorities to chalk out the best-case and the worst-case scenarios. He said cases of reinfections have occurred mostly in people who fell ill with one variant and then later contracted a different variant, calling it 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,” he added.
Omicron-driven Covid cases dip in US, some areas may still see rise: CDC
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, informed that the seven-day daily average of Covid-19 cases is about 744,600 per day, a 5% decline over the previous week. The hospital admissions, however, with an increase of about 1% over the previous week, remain near all time-highs.
“As we have seen during other phases of this pandemic, the surge in cases started at different times in different regions, and may continue to see high case counts in some areas of the country in the days and weeks ahead,” Walensky said.
