Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that he did not anticipate that the number of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States would reach current levels, regretting that indoor activities and vacation trips have facilitated the transmission of the virus and urging Americans to take the necessary public safety precautions to delay the continued increase.
“Having 300,000 cases on any given day and between two and 3,000 deaths per day is just terrible,” the country’s leading infectious disease expert told ABC’s “This Week” program, Martha Raddatz, on Sunday. “There is no escaping the numbers, Martha. It is something that we have to grasp with certainty and embrace and lower this inflection through a very intense adherence to public health measures, uniformly, across the country, no exception.”
Fauci’s comments came minutes after President Donald Trump wrongly claimed a tweet that the numbers of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of infected people and deaths in the country are “exaggerated”, although coronavirus cases continue to increase across the country. Even with recent data fluctuating due to inconsistent reports over the holidays, the US this weekend has topped 20 million cases of COVID-19 and 350,000 deaths since the pandemic began 10 months ago.
“The deaths are real deaths,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when asked by Raddatz about his response to the president’s tweet. “All you have to do is go to the trenches. Go to the hospitals and see what health professionals are up against. They are in very stressful situations in many areas of the country. Hospital beds are stretched, people are running out. of the beds, running out of trained personnel who are exhausted. “
“This is real,” he continued. “This is not false. This is real.”
At “This Week”, Fauci also responded to growing concerns about the speed of vaccinations in the US
“Many states (are) using only a small percentage of the vaccines they received,” said Raddatz. “What is the biggest cause of this delay?”
“I think it’s just trying to start a massive vaccine program and start on the right foot,” replied Fauci, acknowledging that there were “some flaws”, which he called “understandable”, given the scale of the effort. But the doctor said the recent figures offered a “glimmer of hope”.
“In the past 72 hours, they put 1.5 million doses in people’s arms, which is an average of around 500,000 a day, which is much better than at the beginning, when it was much, much less than that. ”Said Fauci. “So we are not where we want to be, there is no doubt about that, but I think we can get there if we really accelerate, get some momentum and see what happens as we enter the first weeks of January.”
As of Sunday morning, more than 14 million doses of vaccines have been distributed across the United States, but only 4.2 million people have received injections, according to the CDC, sparking criticism of the government’s implementation plan by Democrats and Democrats. republicans.
“As I have long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” said President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday, saying that at the current rate, “it will take years – not months – – to vaccinate the American people. “
“Unlike the development of vaccines, the vaccination process itself is lagging behind,” Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said in a statement on Friday. “That comprehensive vaccination plans have not been developed at the federal level and sent to the states as models is both incomprehensible and inexcusable.”
Trump noted the gap between delivery and immunization numbers in a separate tweet on Sunday morning, seeming to characterize the disparity as the effect of a successful distribution plan.
“Vaccines are being delivered to the states by the Federal Government much faster than they can be administered!” Trump I wrote.
Even if the United States’ vaccination program accelerates, health experts fear that continued skepticism about inoculation could prolong the pandemic. Last week, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine reported that 60% of eligible nursing home workers were refusing the vaccine; Fauci said that more than 70% of the population will likely need to be immunized to obtain collective immunity.
In “This Week,” Raddatz referred to this mistrust of the vaccine while pressing Fauci over his prediction that the days of the pandemic’s decline and a sense of “normality” could arrive in the fall.
“It will depend entirely on vaccine intake,” he said. “If from April, May, June, July and August, we do the type of (increased) implementation of the vaccine that I’m talking about – at least (1) million people a day and maybe more – by the end of the summer and by autumn, we’ll have reached that level of herd immunity that I think will take us back to some form of normalcy. “
Looking to the future, Fauci recalled the success of a vaccination effort over 70 years ago in his hometown, New York, which provides a plan of what he believes is possible in 2021 in the United States. In 1947, 5 million New Yorkers were immunized against smallpox in two weeks, he said.
“The goal of vaccinating 100 million people in the first 100 days is a realistic goal,” said Fauci in Sunday’s interview. “We can take care of 1 million people a day. You know we have done massive vaccination programs, Martha, in our history. There is no reason why we cannot do that now.”