Doctors: Some people in US trying to contract Omicron deliberately

Doctors say there is a dangerous trend of people deliberately getting the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus to "get it over with" .

It is "all the rage", Dr Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told CNN.

"It's caught on like wildfire," Dr Robert Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told CNN. "And it's widespread, coming from all types of people, the vaccinated and boosted and the anti-vaxxers," he added. "You'd be crazy to try to get infected with this. It's like playing with dynamite.

"People are talking about Omicron like it's a bad cold. It is not a bad cold," Murphy said. "It's a life-threatening disease."

It is true that if you catch the Omicron variant of COVID-19, as opposed to the Delta variant, "you're less likely to be hospitalized, less likely to go to the ICU (intensive care unit), less likely to be put on a mechanical ventilator and less likely to die — and that's true of all age groups," Offit said.

"But that doesn't mean that it can't be a severe illness," he added. "It's just less severe. But you don't have a zero percent chance of dying. You should never want to get infected."

While most people have spent the last two years trying to avoid contracting coronavirus, the Los Angeles Times reported that some parents are taking their kids to "COVID-19 parties" to deliberately infect them so that in theory they will have natural immunity.

In one social media video that is circulating, a woman purposely tries to get the coronavirus by sharing her COVID-positive daughter's glass of orange juice.

"When you're COVID positive, and mum drinks your OJ to try and get COVID asap so we aren't extended iso," the video caption read.

In another video, a bride-to-be is purposefully attempting to catch the coronavirus. In the 15-second video, the woman embraced multiple people and swapped drinks at a nightclub, trying to contract the coronavirus.

"POV your wedding is in 6 weeks and you still haven't had COVID," the video caption read. The video had 121,000 views on TikTok.

The logic behind the trend, according to various TikTok videos and other posts, is to contract the virus and "speed up the process", therefore avoiding extended isolation.

People who have contracted Omicron could also get long-lasting COVID. An estimated 100 million people around the world have or have had long COVID-19, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan in November.

"People don't know if they're going to [be one] of the folks who are able to endure an infection with few long-term consequences," Laolu Fayanju, regional medical director for Oak Street Health in Ohio told Time magazine. There's no reason to intentionally take that risk, he added.

Catching Omicron on purpose also can stress the healthcare system, Murphy said. The US set a new COVID-19 hospitalization record on Monday, with 140,000 COVID-related patients staying in hospitals. The US reported roughly 1.5 million new cases on Monday, the highest daily total for any country in the world, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.