Hopes for a normal holiday season are being dashed as the Omicron (B.1.1.529) 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