We all like to believe Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA Commissioner when he said that Omicron is just a “milder form of COVID”. But is that really true? A new prediction regarding how many people will die of COVID in the US until March comes to tell us that Omicron is not so mild after all.
According to USA Today News, modelers tell the world that the current COVID surge in the US will slow down in mid-March, but at a terrible cost: from 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans will die of the coronavirus until that time.
Roughly 800,000 infections in the US per day
If we all take a look at what worldometers.info reports, we see that the US has to deal with roughly 800,000 COVID infections every day. That’s terrifyingly bad, as the current COVID surge is overwhelming the health system. Therefore, the new prediction shouldn’t surprise us at all.
Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist from the University of Florida, says it clear, as quoted by USA Today News:
A lot of people are still going to die because of how transmissible omicron has been.
Here’s what Dr. Scott Gottlieb had to say in early January regarding the Omicron variant, as quoted by CBSNews.com:
There’s a very clear, as I said, decoupling between cases and hospitalizations and does appear now based on a lot of experimental evidence that we’ve gotten just in the last two weeks, that this is a milder form of the coronavirus appears to be a more of an upper airway disease and a lower airway disease that’s good for most Americans,
The one group that may be a problem is very young kids, very young children, toddlers who have trouble with upper airway infections, and you’re in fact seeing more croup-like infections and bronchiolitis in New York City among children.
It seems that the doctor was wrong at that time.
