Enlarge this image
Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical adviser and director of the NIAID, testifies at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill last week. Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images hide caption
toggle caption Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images 
Global Health
These are the 5 things needed to stabilize the pandemic in Europe, WHO expert says
However, he said “if you look at the history of infectious diseases, we’ve only eradicated one infectious disease in man, and that’s smallpox. That’s not going to happen with this virus.”
See more: Is covid 19 going away
YouTube
“But hopefully it will be at such a low level that it doesn’t disrupt our normal social, economic and other interactions,” said Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
View more: Tucker Carlson Says He Was ‘Wrong’ About Ukraine but Blames Kamala Harris
“I think that’s what most people feel when they talk about in endemicity, where it is integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases that we experience,” such as the flu, he said.
Fauci said it may still be too early to tell whether the surge in cases driven by the omicron variant will push the pandemic toward a more manageable phase, “but I would hope that’s the case.”
“That would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response to the prior variant,” Fauci cautioned.
Africa
Top scientists say Africa may have reached a less threatening phase of COVID
View more: Important information about COVID-19 and your HRA benefits
Fauci’s remarks come as the omicron variant of the coronavirus is causing a huge worldwide spike in new cases. The sheer number of people who have become infected with the variant has overwhelmed medical resources in many parts of the world, even though omicron has proved to be less deadly than its delta predecessor.
Some 5.4 million new cases of coronavirus infection were reported last week in the U.S. alone, according to data tallied by Johns Hopkins University. Since the start of the pandemic, nearly 852,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. Worldwide, the disease has claimed more than 5.5 million lives.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Morning Edition live blog
