Acting FDA Director: "Most People Are Gonna Get COVID" as Cases Pass 62M

The United States has surpassed 62 million COVID cases with many more to come. According to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, there have been 62,204,730 COVID-19 cases in the U.S. resulting in the deaths of 842,121 Americans representing a mortality rate of 1.4%. Hospitalizations have now surpassed 140,000.

In sobering testimony today before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (the same committee hearing where Dr. Fauci refused to suffer the foolishness of Rand Paul and other Senate Republicans), Acting FDA Director Dr. Janet Woodcock stated:

I think it's hard to process what's actually happening right now, which is [that] most people are gonna get COVID. And what we need to do is make sure that the hospitals can still function [and that] transportation [and] other essential services are not disrupted while this happens. I think after that will be a good time to reassess how we're approaching this pandemic.

Does this mean we can expect a fourfold or fivefold increase in cases? If so then how quickly? When will we reach our peak?

With the last question in mind, consider this report from NBC Philadelphia:

Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19′s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically. 

 

The reason: The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected.

“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic might unfold. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or at the same pace. And weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes to pass.

“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.

So we might stop seeing days with a 1 million cases by Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. But the peak might go down to half a million new cases a day for several weeks. A year ago, we peaked with 250,000 cases a day. In other words, the peak might be coming soon but the climb down will be long and slow.