Hopes for a normal holiday season are being dashed as the Omicron (B.1.1.529) COVID-19 variant continues to sweep across the United States.

As of today, the variant has been detected in 45 states, and is causing a surge of case activity in the Northeast, where New York City has emerged once again as a virus hot spot.

In an interview on National Public Radio, outgoing National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, warned that the country could see up to 1 million daily infections if Americans don't take the Omicron variant seriously.

"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 said.

COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths lag behind initial infections by about 3-4 weeks, so the true impact of Omicron will not be felt until the new year. But hospitals in many parts of tech country are already strained from sustained Delta (B1617.2) activity.

The United States reported 70,815 new COVID-19 cases yesterday, and 137 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker. The 7-day average of new daily cases is 131,903, with 1,289 deaths, according to the Washington Post tracker.

Cases have risen 12% over the past week, deaths are up 4%, and hospitalizations have remained flat.

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