As Americans grow weary of an extended period stuck inside their homes and away from work, a top-ranking member of the White House coronavirus task force is presenting a “glimmer of hope” that life may get back to normal sooner rather than later.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, said on Wednesday the White House is preparing for a “reentry into normality” if the 30-day social distancing directive from President Trump, which ends on April 30, is “successful.”
“You don’t want to let up at a time that’s premature, but right now, we are clearly looking at, if we are in fact as successful as we hope to be over the extended 30-day period that the president announced several days ago, mainly extending the period of restrictions and guidelines to the end of April, that if in fact we are successful, it makes sense to at least to plan what a reentry into normality would look like,” Fauci told Fox News anchor Ed Henry.
Fauci said he was at the White House “until late at night” discussing the reopening of the country with other members of the task force. He declined to comment on Trump’s escalation with the World Health Organization a day after the president threatened to withhold funding from the global health body.
Henry referenced a Washington Post report that showed the models, which predicted a far higher rate of cases and deaths, have yet to come true. He questioned how the current numbers could sit at such striking odds with the original charts that were critical evidence to support declaring a national emergency.
“When you have models that project what the number of deaths are going to be or number of hospitalizations, a model is as good as the assumptions that you put into the model. And when the assumptions are sometimes a little bit off, tweaked a little bit, you can get numbers that are far different than what the reality is,” Fauci explained.
