Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the US National Institutes of Health, has warned that the United States of America (USA) may witness one million infections with the Coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) daily during the next stage.
Collins, in an interview with the US National Public Radio before leaving his 12-year post, noted that unless Americans take the Omicron threat seriously, the consequences could be dire.
He expressed his concern about the curve drawn by the institutes for the development of Corona infection, despite his acknowledgment that Americans feel tired of what they have been through the course of about 3 years of the pandemic.
Collins noted that he himself feels tired, but the pandemic is not, and he changes himself every nearly two months in a way that may be more powerful and contagious.
He stressed that it is too early to know the maximum strength of the Omicron mutant to evolve in the USA compared to its predecessors.
But the occurrence of 57 different changes in the deadly virus means that the world starts with a new virus that differs from the one that started with the globe before.
Some experts had expected the United States to reach more than half a million infections by mid-January, which is more than double what the country experienced at the height of last winter.
On the other hand, the chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, said that while officials expected the emergence of new variants of the novel Coronavirus "COVID-19", they did not expect the size of the mutations within Omicron.
"We've definitely seen strains coming in. I think what wasn't expected was the extent of mutations in the amino acid substitutions within the Omicron, which is really unprecedented," Fauci was quoted as saying by The Hill.
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