President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday and recommended that fully vaccinated Americans avoid dining indoors amid the surge of Omicron variant cases of COVID-19.
CNN host Dana Bash asked, “How should vaccinated and boosted people behave? Can they go into a restaurant, eat safely indoors right now?” (RELATED: Michigan To Defy Biden Administration’s Latest Guidance On COVID)
“You know, when you’re having such a — I call it a tsunami of infections, Dana, we are seeing people who are vaccinated and boosted who are getting breakthrough infections,” Fauci explained. “So when you’re in a situation where you have so many infections going out, the thing that you want to say is that, if you want to do things like that, better do them in a setting where you know the people around you are vaccinated and boosted.”
“That’s the reason why I’ve been saying when asked about the holiday season,” Fauci continued, “the safest thing to do is to be in a home setting, friends, relatives who you know are vaccinated and boosted. If you want to go the extra step of safety, then get a quick antigen test, which will give you an extra degree of safety. What you want to avoid are places where you have 20, 30, 40, 50 people, many of whom you have no idea of whether or not they’re vaccinated or boosted. That’s more risky than the home setting.”
The U.S. reported more than 2.7 million COVID-19 cases in the last week of 2021 and data showed that the last week of December 2021 had several days with the highest number of positive cases for the entire pandemic.
Meanwhile, Fauci admitted Sunday that even though the U.S. was currently seeing “unprecedented” numbers of Omicron cases, the severity of infection remained relatively low as compared to other variants.