• Dr. Anthony Fauci shut down any Americans’ ideas for big New Year’s Eve parties this year
  • ‘If your plans are to go to a 40 to 50-person New Year’s Eve party with all the bells and whistles and everybody hugging and kissing… I would strongly recommend that this year, we do not do that’ Fauci said Wednesday
  • He added a sobering message during Wednesday’s White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing: ‘Ultimately we’re going to have to live with something that will not be eradicated’
  •  Fauci said Wednesday ‘all indications point to a lesser severity of Omicron versus Delta’   
  • The CDC made a shock revision of Omicron prevalence, cutting the number of cases of the new strain by half
  • Omicron accounted for 23% of all cases in the week ending December 18, as opposed to 73% initially reported
  • The Omicron variant accounted for 59% of all new cases for the week ending on December 25, CDC says 
  • It means that Delta has been accounting for far more infections than the agency initially thought 
  • On Tuesday the US broke its record for daily COVID-19 cases, with a seven-day average of 264,546 cases  
  • The U.S. recorded 377,014 new cases on Tuesday and 2,377 deaths in 24 hours