US daily COVID-19 cases drop 47 percent over past week: report

Cases of COVID-19 are falling in the United States for the first time since the highly contagious Omicron variant began spreading towards the end of 2021.

Daily COVID-19 cases across the United States have dropped 47 percent in the past week, according to recent data analyzed by the New York Post.

"There were about 717,800 new cases reported in the US on Monday, statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University show," the New York Post wrote in a report published Tuesday. "The average infection count has been sitting at about 800,000 per day over the past week. It is a sharp drop from the record 1.4 million new cases reported just one week earlier on Jan. 10, according to the data."

Monday is regularly the day where case counts spike due to figures lagging behind on the weekend finally being reported, the Daily Mail explained, further noting that this Monday's lower numbers could have been affected by the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal holiday, where many local governments and municipalities were closed and did not fully report cases. According to the Daily Mail, some of these COVID-19 cases could be reported on Tuesday instead.

Despite the national holiday though, cases have been trending downwards, especially in states hardest hit by the recent variant.

Over the past 14 days, cases in the US are still up 40 percent, though that figure is expected to drop in the coming days as cases further decline in states that were previously marked as COVID-19 hotspots.

In New York, where cases jumped ten-fold over a matter of weeks and peaked at 40,000 new cases per day at the beginning of January, the state saw a 27 percent decrease in new cases over the past two weeks. The state, once leading the nation in new cases, has dropped out of the top 15 states. Neighboring New Jersey has seen a similar spike and drop, now recording a 28 percent decrease in cases over the last 14 days, marking the largest drop out of any of the states.

Georgia, a leading state in the south in new cases,  is now only recording an 18 percent increase in cases over the past two weeks. Maryland has seen a 21 percent decrease in new cases over the last two weeks, while Cook County in Illinois, which includes Chicago, has seen a near 25 percent decrease in cases since January 9.

"Scientists in the US are hopeful that the same steep drop in cases seen in countries such as the United Kingdom and South Africa - where Omicron was first sequenced - will also be repeated here," the Daily Mail reported.

South Africa is now recording just 5,000 new COVID-19 cases per day, after they had reached a peak of around 23,000 new cases per day a few weeks ago.

Despite the promising data though, NIAID director and chief medial advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that he is concerned about the emergence of another COVID-19 variant that has mutated in a way to maneuver around the protection provided by recovering from Omicron, according to the Daily Mail.

"He says that even if Omicron - which has caused a massive surge in new cases worldwide but is not as severe or deadly as its predecessors - is the final strain of COVID, it will likely become endemic, meaning the outbreak becomes predictable," the Daily Mail reported.

"I would hope that that's the case," Fauci said, in response to scientists' predictions that the virus could have a flu-type relationship with people by the end of the year. "But that would only be the case if we don't get another variant that eludes the immune response of the prior variant."

Fauci also warned during the Davos Agenda virtual event on Monday that natural immunity against the virus may not be as effective as some believe.

Former chief of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and current board member at Pfizer Dr Scott Gottlieb was optimistic though that unless the virus drastically shifts from its current state, it will likely enter an endemic state in the foreseeable future. "I think the base case is that this signals the end of the pandemic phase of this virus," Gottlieb told CNBC's "The Squawk Box."

"The worrisome scenario is that you get something that's divergent evolution like Omicron did. Something that's dramatically different than the variants that are circulating right now," he said.

"Most people think that's unlikely to happen but most people felt that was unlikely to happen before and that Delta would be the dominant lineage, and then Omicron came along, it had been mutating in a sequestered pocket somewhere and re-emerged into the human circulation," he added.