The head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that current coronavirus levels of 60,000 to 70,000 new cases per day are unacceptable.
Therefore, he advocated the withdrawal of masking and physical distancing “carefully and slowly”.
Partial transcription as follows:
BRENNAN: You recently warned that the country may be at risk for another peak of infection. Are you concerned about a fourth wave of this epidemic?
DR. FAUCI: Well, my concern, Margaret, is based on the fact that although the cases are going down very well, you have a very sharp decrease, over the past week and a half, we have seen that this decline has now done this, essentially starting to stagnate . And, historically, if you look at the different outbreaks we had, when they fell and then started to stabilize at a very high level, a plateau at a level of 60 to 70,000 new cases per day is not an acceptable level. This is really high. And if you look at what happened in Europe a few weeks ago, they are usually a few weeks ahead of us in those patterns, they were falling, too, so they’ve stagnated. And over the past week or so, they have seen an increase of about 9% in cases. So the message we are saying is that we want to go back carefully and slowly about withdrawing mitigation methods. But don’t turn that switch on and off because it would be really risky to have another peak again, which we don’t want to happen because we are stagnating at a very high level. Sixty to 70,000 new infections per day is quite high.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I know you have been watching this new strain from New York carefully that has shown some resistance to antibody and vaccine treatments. How widespread is it?
DR. FAUCI: Well, it’s still not widespread, but it seems to be spreading quite efficiently across the New York metropolitan area and beyond. One of the things you should be careful about is that when you get a variant that has the ability to be quite vigorous in its ability to spread, and the fact is that it runs away a little bit, not as far as the South IS isolated African, but it escapes the protection of antibodies, both from monoclonal antibodies and from the vaccine. The only thing you want to do is make sure you don’t allow it to continue to spread. Two ways to do this: vaccinate people as quickly and expeditiously as possible and, above all, maintain the public health measures that we are talking about, masking, physical distance and the prevention of congregated environments, especially in closed environments. This is what you can do to prevent the spread of a worrying variant.
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