Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert at the US National Institutes of Health, has told the US Congress he is “quite concerned” about the surge in Covid cases in a number of states and new case numbers may more than double if it isn’t contained.
USA Today: Dr. Anthony Fauci tells Congress new coronavirus cases could reach 100,000 a day without changes
New coronavirus infections could increase to 100,000 a day if the nation doesn’t get its surge of cases under control, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress Tuesday.
“We’ve really got to do something about that and we need to deal with it quickly,” he testified. “It could get very bad.”
said the surge has been caused both by some areas reopening too quickly and by people not following guidelines.
“We’ve got to get that message out that we are all in this together,” Fauci told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “And if we are going to contain this, we’ve got to contain it together.”
Fauci, said he’s “quite concerned” about what’s happening in many states.
Asked what’s going wrong, he said several states may have moved “too quickly” and skipped over some of the checkpoints laid out for a safe reopening.
But even in areas where state and local officials followed the federal guidelines, people acted as if all restrictions had been lifted, he said.
“What we saw were a lot of people who maybe felt that because they think they are invulnerable, and we know many young people are not because they’re getting serious disease, that therefore they’re getting infected has nothing at all to do with anyone else, when in fact it does,” Fauci said.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., opened the hearing on the state of the coronavirus pandemic by reupping his past recommendation that President Donald Trump wear a mask to reduce the political divide on that health recommendation.
But Trump thinks that people wear masks to”signal disapproval” of him, and Trump ‘eager’ for more rallies despite Fauci ‘plea’ that people avoid crowds
President Trump’s campaign said he wanted to hold more rallies, even as states wrestle with a surge in the number of new coronavirus cases.
“President Trump is eager to keep hitting the campaign trail and holding more rallies to speak directly to the American people,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“Even though many people, for a variety of reasons, do not listen to the, not suggestion, but plea to not congregate in crowds, some people are going to do that anyway,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a committee hearing last week.
“If you do, please wear a mask,” he said.
Trump has been seen wearing a mask publicly only once and said last week he believed some people wore masks to “signal disapproval” of him.
More from yesterday’s hearing:
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., opened the hearing on the state of the coronavirus pandemic by reupping his past recommendation that President Donald Trump wear a mask to reduce the political divide on that health recommendation.
“The president has plenty of admirers,” Alexander said. “They would follow his lead.”
Except Trump isn’t leading, he’s flailing and floundering, and polls suggest the number of admirers is rapidly shrinking see RCP average 55.4% unfavourable (-14.6%), and FiveThirtyEight 56.4% Disapprove (-16%).
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee, tore into Trump in her opening comments.
“We’ve seen a leadership crisis raging in the White House as the president proves time after time he cares less about how this pandemic is impacting families and communities and more about how it makes him look,” she said.
His latest tweets don’t make him look very good:
Who is ‘they’? Those trying to protect Americans from Covid?
The White House has often presented a rosier picture of the pandemic than what health officials describe.
Asked Monday about Azar’s warning, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president is encouraged that there has been a decline in fatality rates and an increase in effective treatments.
“These things make us uniquely equipped to handle the increase in cases that we’ve seen,” McEnany said.
“I’m not satisfied with what’s going on,” Fauci said, “because we’re going in the wrong direction.”
Case numbers are certainly surging in the wrong direction in the US. It’s too soon to tell whether the death rate follows suit, but it is bad enough as it is despite dropping from peaking in April-May.