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The United States has far too many cases of the coronavirus to end the pandemic, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Axios in an interview published Thursday.
“The end of the game is to remove the virus,” Fauci said. “At the moment, we are still in pandemic mode because we have 160,000 new infections per day.”
The seven-day average of new cases declined slightly from the previous week, to 140,000 cases, although the number of reported cases may be low given two public holidays this week. Such high rates make it impossible to return to a semblance of normal life, Fauci said.
“In a country our size, you can’t hang around and have 100,000 infections a day. You have to go well below 10,000 before you start to feel comfortable, ”he said.
This landmark is familiar. In an August 2020 interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci warned that cases must fall below 10,000 per day. At the time, they were around 50,000, before reaching a peak of almost 300,000 cases per day in January.
In March of this year, Fauci warned of loosening restrictions before cases drop to 10,000, “and maybe even considerably less than that.” Even so, states have moved forward with plans to reopen, which Fauci called “inexplicable.” Fauci continued to designate 10,000 cases or less as the benchmark for ending the pandemic.
Even in June, the lowest point of the pandemic, the lowest average in the United States was more than 11,000 cases per day. Now, with the arrival of the highly transmissible Delta variant and the continued lack of precautions against the virus, cases have increased in recent months.
“It’s not even a modestly good control,” Fauci told Axios, “which means it’s a threat to public health.”
Vaccines are still essential to suppress the virus, Fauci said. When a high proportion of the population is protected by vaccines, “you will still have infected people, but it will not pose a threat to public health.”
Right now, however, just over half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated.
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