Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Americans this week that they could soon face additional COVID-19 lockdown measures should a new strain of the virus cause case numbers to increase, Fox News reported.

Fauci, who also serves as an adviser to President Biden, said the BA.2 subvariant could soon increase the rate of infections in America. He suggested that Americans should "be able to pivot" back and forth between a more common way of life and the measures that were taken in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus at the height of the pandemic.

"If in fact, we do see a turnaround and a resurgence, we have to be able to pivot and go back to any degree of mitigation that is commensurate with what the situation is," Fauci said Thursday during an interview with CNN.

"We can't just say, 'We're done. We're going to move on.' We've got to be able to be flexible because we're dealing with a dynamic situation," he added, noting the new variant to be less fatal than the Omicron variant. "The overall mortality is actually down. It’s a very interesting situation where the cases are going up, but it does not, at this point in time, appear to be any degree of severity."

Fauci added that he "would not be surprised in the next few weeks, given the fact that we’ve begun to open up, and we have an increase in the BA.2 variant, that we’ll be seeing an increase in cases."