The nation’s top infectious disease expert urged caution to those eager to get back to normal, warning that the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is “really not good.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a Facebook Live interview on Monday that the U.S. is still “knee-deep” in dealing with the first wave of coronavirus infections that began in early March.
“We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this,” he told National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins. “And I would say, this would not be considered a wave. It was a surge or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline.”
Case numbers in the country have skyrocketed in recent weeks, particularly across the South, as states increase testing measures, and several major cities, including Houston, are struggling to cope with an influx of new patients. Fauci warned that while European nations have more or less mitigated the seriousness of the outbreak, the U.S. is still attempting to contain the first wave.
“The European Union as an entity, it went up and then came down to baseline,” Fauci continued. “Now, they’re having little blips, as you might expect, as they try to reopen. We went up, never came down to baseline, and now it’s surging back up. So it’s a serious situation that we have to address immediately.”
According to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, more than 30 states have reported higher numbers of positivity rates compared to last week.
Fauci also touched on concerns that the Trump administration and some local and state governments are weighing the importance of the economy with the seriousness of the disease.
“We’ve got to make sure that we don’t create this binary type thing of ‘it’s us against them,'” Fauci said. “It’s not. We’re all in it together.”
