SHOCKING! US to see 140 million new COVID-19 infections in the next 3 months
"We are expecting an enormous surge in infections ... so, an enormous spread of omicron," IHME director Dr Chris Murray was quoted as saying.
Omicron is currently the dominant variant in the United States with over 73 percent cases of the new COVID-19 variant. Now, new modeling data has shown that highly transmissible new strain will cause 140 million new infections from January to March, infecting 60 percent of all Americans, the majority of which will be asymptomatic cases.
According to researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, while infection will surge, it will have fewer hospitalisations and deaths compared to the Delta variant, USA Today reported.
The findings showed that the COVID cases may peak in late January at about 2.8 million new daily infections.
"We are expecting an enormous surge in infections ... so, an enormous spread of omicron," IHME director Dr Chris Murray was quoted as saying. "Total infections in the US we forecast are going from about 40 percent of the US having been infected so far, to having in the next 2 to 3 months, 60 percent of the US getting infected with Omicron," he added.
While meta-analyses have suggested previous variants cause about 40 percent of cases to be asymptomatic, Murray said more than 90 percent of people infected with omicron may never show symptoms.
As a result, only about 400,000 cases may be reported, as most Americans infected with the virus won't feel sick and may never get tested, the report said. At the peak of last year's winter surge in January, the country was reporting a little over 250,000 new cases per day. The US has reported about 51 million confirmed cases since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins data.
On the other hand, the world may see approximately 3 billion new infections in the next two months with peak transmission occurring in mid-January at more than 35 million new cases per day, the models showed.
Murray noted that the forecast may be pessimistic, but other health experts say it is within the realm of possibility based on the early, incomplete information on Omicron.
"In the past, we roughly thought that COVID was 10 times worse than flu and now we have a variant that is probably at least 10 times less severe," Murray said. "So, Omicron will probably a be less severe than flu but much more transmissible."