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Top U.S. health officials are urging caution amid reports of coronavirus cases peaking in some areas and speculation that the omicron variant could be what ends the pandemic.
“It’s an open question whether it will be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for,” Anthony S. Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser, said Monday during a virtual panel at the Davos Agenda.
“I hope that’s the case. But that would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that evades the immune response of the previous variant,” he said. Even then, he added, COVID-19 is likely to remain part of the world as an endemic disease.
National Health Director Vivek H. Murthy expressed a similar note of caution Sunday in. CNN, saying that despite apparent omicron spikes in areas of the northeastern U.S., much of the country is not there yet. “We shouldn’t expect a nationwide spike in the next few days,” he said.
Meanwhile, the executive director of PfizerAlbert Bourla, predicted that “we will soon be able to resume normal life,” given pandemic mitigation measures, including testing and vaccines. But he also said that doesn’t mean the end of the coronavirus. “We’ve had so many surprises since the beginning of the pandemic,” he said in an interview published Sunday in the French newspaper Le Figaro. “We will probably have to live for years with a virus that is very difficult to eradicate.”
Omicron causes shortage of workers in the U.S.
Worker shortages caused by the variant omicron coronavirus and negotiations over a new contract for dockworkers are likely to exacerbate costly supply chain bottlenecks in the coming months in the U.S., clouding prospects for rapid relief from the highest inflation in four decades.
The White House says the worst may be in the past, noting that key Southern California ports are reducing their cargo backlogs and transpacific shipping costs have plummeted by more than a third since their mid-September peak.
But the cost of shipping a standard container from China to the U.S. West Coast remains more than triple what it was a year ago and is expected to remain high through the first half of the year.
[Con información e AP, CNN, The Washington Post]
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