US could see 1 million daily Covid cases, retiring federal health director warns

National Institutes of Health director Dr Francis Collins issues a stark warning on his final day in office

The retiring director of the National Institutes of Health has issued a grim warning about the future of the Covid-19 pandemic on his final day in a role he has held for more than a decade.

If the US does not take serious and immediate steps to counter a winter surge of infections and the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant, the nation could see 1 million cases a day, according to Dr Francis Collins.

“We cannot afford to let down our guard,” he told NPR in an interview published on 18 December.

“I know people are tired of this,” he added. “I’m tired of it too, believe me. But the virus is not tired of us. It’s having a great old time changing its shape every couple of months, coming up with new variants and figuring out ways to be even more contagious.”

Earlier more pessimistic projections predicted as many as 500,000 daily infections by the end of January, roughly doubling last winter’s peak.

Dr Collins is less optimistic.

“Even if it has a somewhat lower risk of severity, we could be having a million cases a day if we’re not really attentive to all of those mitigation strategies,” he told NPR.

On Sunday, Dr Collins also told Fox News that “we are in for a world of trouble” within the next month or two.

But he stressed that “we have things we can do” to combat the pandemic, including “vaccines and boosters and being careful about masking again”.

While Delta currently remains the overwhelmingly dominant variant in US infections, Omicron is rapidly spreading. It has been detected in 89 countries and is driving the doubling of infections every one to three days in areas with community spread, according to the World Health Organization.

Early reports suggest the highly-mutated variant can evade some immune protections from vaccines, but additional protections from booster shots are critical in protecting against severe illness and hospitalisation.

Dr Collins – who was appointed to lead the nation’s medical research agency by President Barack Obama in 2009 – has spent 12 years in the role, the longest in the position’s history.

He said his tenure is “a long time to have a single leader of this largest supporter of biomedical research in the world.”

“It’s good to have a new vision,” he told CBS News in an exit interview.

He said he managed to steer away from partisan debates involving his office, though he refused to endorse scientifically disproven treatments for Covid-19 pushed by former president Donald Trump, and resisted attempts by his administration to fire Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the White House’s current chief medical adviser.

“Can you imagine a circumstance where the director of the [National Institutes of Health], somebody who believes in science, would submit to political pressures and fire the greatest expert in infectious disease that the world has known, just to satisfy political concerns?” Dr Collins told CBS.

President Biden is scheduled to give a speech on his administration’s response to Omicron on Tuesday.

He will issue a “stark warning of what the winter will look like for Americans that choose to remain unvaccinated,” according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

More than 58 million people – about one in six Americans – have received a “booster” vaccine shot, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Roughly 30 per cent of eligible Americans remain unvaccinated.