On New Year's Eve, Senator Marco Rubio criticized the public response to the highly transmissible variant of the Coronavirus, Omicron, saying that fears arising from the increase in new cases amount to "irrational hysteria".

On that day, when Marco Rubio’s home state of Florida hit a record 75,900 new cases of COVID-19, according to the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” in the country, the senator took to Twitter to minimize the severity of the new variant. The bet on the denialist tactic may be related to the re-election attempt this year, even with the rise in hospitalizations and the great demand for Covid tests.

According to NBC News publication, “the controversy over his comments comes after Florida had a 744 percent jump in cases in the past two weeks, joining Washington as the two states with the biggest jump”.

“Rubio, a Republican, faced backlash online for a New Year’s Eve tweet in which he said that the record numbers of people testing positive ‘for a sore throat isn’t a crisis. And people in the hospital for car accidents testing positive isn’t a surge. The real crisis is the irrational hysteria which has people with no symptoms waiting hours for a test or missing work for 10 days.” Despite critical responses to the tweet, Rubio did not back down.

Despite continued frustration among Americans with the duration of the pandemic, which enters its third year in a row – and with President Joe Biden's continued push for vaccines – the US recorded a record number of new COVID-19 cases in the first week of January.

Also, according to NBC News, “the U.S. recorded 1 million new COVID cases on Monday, and in the following two days, Florida set daily records for new coronavirus cases, according to an NBC News data analysis. Child hospitalizations nationally are soaring. Hospitalizations in Florida have nearly quadrupled the past two weeks and are at more than 6,500. Adjusted for population Florida’s hospitalization rate is in the middle of the country, with about 30 hospitalizations per 100,000 residents”.

“Rubio acknowledged the record number of omicron cases, but said they are ‘virtually unpreventable’ in another tweet and said illness from the variant is ‘far less severe’. He added, ‘It's time to get back to normal and learn to coexist with an endemic virus by managing risk and mitigating harm’.”

More than 825,000 people have died of coronavirus in the US, and 54.7 million cases were confirmed, according to the Johns Hopkins University map.