Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday said he’s confident the U.S. can push the spread of the coronavirus “way down” by November and that officials need to move away from an “all-or-none” mitigation mindset.
“If we pay attention to the fundamental tenets of infection control and diminution of transmission, we could be way down in November. It is entirely conceivable,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“It isn’t inevitable that we need to be way up there as we get towards [the] election, and I feel that very strongly,” said Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Fauci said the U.S. can slow the spread without resorting to strict lockdowns if people engage in practices such as wearing masks, practicing good hygiene and social distancing.
“You can proceed to open up the country and get the economy back even when you have situations that we have now, so long as everybody does the five or six fundamental things,” he said. “We’ve got to get away from that all-or-none phenomenon.”
He cited Arizona as a good example.
“They went up and they started to really clamp down and do things right and the cases came right down,” he said. “We can do that throughout those areas that are surging.”
Late last month, there had been close to 70,000 daily new cases in the U.S., though the seven-day moving average has been coming down in recent weeks.
Dr. Fauci had previously said that cases were still unacceptably high when the country had “plateaued” at around 20,000 new cases per day after an initial spike in the spring.
“We will be able to get that baseline down to a level of hundreds of cases and maybe a thousand or two, rather than 20,000,” he said on Thursday.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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