During this pandemic, Fauci has often been tasked with explaining things that are in tension with one another. Right now, the tension is temporal, between a present in which the number of deaths remains intolerably high—on average, about fourteen hundred per day—and a likely, but not certain, near future in which the emergency has retreated, even if the disease remains. “Let me give you a confounding issue, which I find really interesting,” Fauci said. The first country known to have gone through an Omicron wave is South Africa, which experienced a sharp peak in cases followed by a quick decline—a heartening scenario, if applicable to the U.S. But South Africa, Fauci went on, had very few cases of the Delta variant at the time. “So when we were looking at South Africa, we were looking at a pure Omicron situation. In the United States, we still have a lot of people in the hospital who are Delta people. So right now it’s a little muddy.”

This week, Fauci said, he was watching the situation in London, which he thought might provide a better model for the American experience of the variant. In late December, London hospital admissions were increasing by as much as fifteen per cent a day, but that rate has since dropped dramatically. “Sometimes you have a sawtooth—it goes up and then it looks like it comes down, but then it goes back up again. So, if London does that, that’s what I’m really keeping my eye on,” he said. If the peak in London turned out to be real, I asked, how would he feel about the American wave? “Absolutely more optimistic,” Fauci said.