This may not be what you want to hear.
According to Fauci, unvaccinated individuals are still going to"get the brunt of the severe aspect" of the Omicron variant, although this version of the virus is said to be less severe overall than previous strains. Per the infectious disease expert, unvaccinated people have a 10 times greater chance of getting infected, a 17 times greater chance of getting hospitalized, and a 20 times greater chance of dying from COVID compared to those who have been inoculated.
Vaccinated and boosted people will, on the other hand"very likely … do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death," Fauci said. But no matter their vaccination status, not everyone is guaranteed a positive outcome if exposed and infected with this variant. And even if most people have a mild case, the sheer number of infections has serious consequences.
"When you quantitatively have so many people who are infected, a fraction of them, even if it's a small fraction, are going to get seriously ill and are going to die, and that's the reason why it will challenge our health system," Fauci explained to Morrison. There's another reason why getting vaccinated and boosted is still important, even if you might get infected with Omicron anyway. During the Senate hearing, Fauci warned that infection from the Omicron variant may not be able to provide individuals with natural immunity against future variants.
"If we wind up getting infected with Omicron at a very, very low level of pathogenicity, is that going to be sort of almost like a live attenuated vaccine? I don't think we can say that right now," Fauci said."We really have to see how things spread out, when we see how that fares in the next variant. So there will be invariably another variant; we're going to have to take a look at whether or not there's going to be any protection there.
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