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NEW YORK — The United States hit a seven-day average of 265 427 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, blowing past the country’s previous record of about 252 000 daily cases, reported nearly a year ago on January 11.

The new peak, according to Johns Hopkins University data, comes amid a rapid acceleration of infections in the United States — and across the world — since last month.

And experts predict the Omicron variant — the most contagious strain of coronavirus yet — is going to make the start of 2022 very difficult.

“January is going to be a really, really hard month. And people should just brace themselves for a month where lots of people are going to get infected,” said Dr Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

And the US could “see half a million cases a day — easy — sometime over the next week to 10 days,” CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said Sunday.

Most people who are vaccinated and boosted won’t get severe illness, but that won’t be true for the unvaccinated, Jha said.

“A lot of people who have not gotten a vaccine are going to end up getting pretty sick, and it’s going to be pretty disruptive,” Jha said. “My hope is as we get into February and certainly by the time we get into March, infection numbers will come way down, and it’ll also start getting (into) spring, and the weather will start getting better. And that will also help.”

Despite calls from experts for Americans to get their vaccines and boosters, the rate of booster doses getting administered has fallen in recent weeks, while only 32,7 percent of the country’s fully vaccinated population is boosted.

In addition to getting vaccinated and boosted, people can protect themselves by taking precautions in public, Jha said.

“I would urge people to wear a higher quality mask any time they’re in a place with lots of people and they’re going to be indoors for any extended period of time,” Jha said.

A surgical mask might be fine for a quick grocery store trip in an empty store, but for other events, a well-fitting N95 or KF94 mask provides better protection, he said.

Looking ahead to New Year’s Eve tomorrow small gatherings of fully vaccinated people will be safe, Dr. Anthony Fauci said. But people should avoid large parties where they don’t know the vaccination status of all guests, he said.

“When you are talking about a New Year’s Eve party where you have 30, 40, 50 people celebrating, you do not know the status of the vaccination, I would recommend strongly: Stay away from that this year,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“There will be other years to do that. But not this year.”

Holiday gatherings, like those over Christmas and New Year’s, have some health care workers worried about the impact on children in the coming weeks — especially those who are too young to be vaccinated.

“We’ve just had all of these kids mixing together with everybody else during Christmas,” said Dr Claudia Hoyen, the director of paediatric infection control at UH Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Ohio.

“We have one more holiday to get through with New Year’s, and then we’ll be sending everybody back to school. Everybody is kind of waiting on the edge, wondering what we’ll end up seeing.”

Nationwide, paediatric Covid-19 hospitalisations are nearing the record high set in September. On average, roughly 305 children were admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 on any given day over the week that ended December 26, according to data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Department of Health.

That’s more than a 48 percent jump from the previous week’s average and just 10,7 percent lower than the peak average of 342 children who were admitted to hospitals with the virus that was recorded at the end of August and early September. — CNN.