Just over 2 weeks ago, outgoing NIH Director Francis Collins predicted the Omicron variant could cause 1 million new cases a day.
Collins told NPR on December 19th, "Even if it has a somewhat lower risk of severity, we could be having a million cases a day if we're not really attentive to all of those mitigation strategies."
Today, his prediction came to pass. After crossing 55 million cases yesterday, the United States added over 1 million new COVID cases today. According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been 56,175,779 cases resulting in 827,751 deaths representing a mortality rate of 1.5%. Additionally, more than 95,000 Americans are presently hospitalized for COVID according to Our World in Data.
The question is for how long are we going to add a million new cases a day. If this happens for the rest of January we will be at 85 million cases. We could be at 100 million cases by Valentine's Day. This will undoubtedly decrease the mortality rate, but there also remains the question of hospitalizations as we appear to climbing back over 100,000. Our winter of discontent has only just begun.
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