Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, disputed President Trump’s claim that the pandemic is almost over, a rare instance of open disagreement with the president.
Fauci told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday that new case data is “disturbing,” hours after Trump said that the United States is “rounding the corner.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with that, because if you look at the thing that you just mentioned, the statistics, Andrea, they’re disturbing,” Fauci said. “We’re plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day, and the deaths are around 1,000.”
The U.S. has made significant progress since July, when new daily coronavirus cases often exceeded 60,000, but state health officials are still reporting a high level of new infections and deaths.
“When you have a baseline of infections that are 40,000 per day and you have threats of increased test positivity in certain regions of the country, such as the Dakotas and Montana and places like that … you don’t want to start off already with a baseline that’s so high,” he said.
More than 6.4 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the U.S., with more than 192,000 deaths.
