According to Newsom, Omicron may be the “last big surge of this pandemic…

According to Newsom, Omicron may be the “last big surge of this pandemic,” and California is now preparing for the endemic stage of Covid.

“We’ll get through this last surge,” California Governor Gavin Newsom declared today at a vaccination site in Southern California.

While Covid cases and test positive are at all-time highs, and hospitalizations are expected to exceed last year’s peak, Newsom claims that the state is seeing “what we hope is the last significant wave of this pandemic.”

His estimate comes just one day after the state set a record high with 143,380 new cases, surpassing the previous high of 141,752 on January 4th. Today’s 7-day test positivity rate is 23 percent (it’s actually 23.1 percent), which is an all-time high, according to the Governor.

Despite the bad news, Newsom issued a second optimistic outlook.

“My sense is that we are in a new phase in this pandemic in a month or a few months, based on the ubiquity and what Dr. Fauci and so many others have said that so many of us are likely to catch this new variation,” he said.

“I believe, in many respects, Omicron, with its incredible, unprecedented degree of transmissibility efficiency, will, in the end, discover just about everyone,” Fauci said yesterday.

“Our hope is that as we get through the next few weeks…our baseline immunity to the Covid-19 virus and its variants that we have seen already — and the ones that are yet to come — will be strong enough to prevent such an immense overwhelm of people’s health and the healthcare system and we get to a bit of a new normal,” said California Director of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly, whom Newsom refers to as “our Dr. Fauci.”

“Not the pandemic phase of this reality,” Newsom continued, “but the endemic phase of this reality and how we live with future versions.” And those — those efforts — are being carried out in real-time, and we’ll be making those precise tactics public in the coming weeks.”