Fauci says US virus cases are more than ten times too high

Coronavirus infections are more than ten times higher than they need to be to end the pandemic, Dr Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease doctor, told the news site Axios policy.

There are currently approximately 150,000 new infections per day in the United States. “It’s not even a modestly good control,” Dr Fauci told Axios.

He added, “In a country our size, you can’t hang around and have 100,000 infections a day. You need to get well below 10,000 before you start to feel comfortable.

Case rates fell to almost that level in June, when there were an average of about 12,000 new infections per day.

But that was before the highly infectious Delta variant spread widely across the country, causing a significant increase in cases and hospitalizations, especially in areas of the country with low vaccination rates.

The increase also affected children, who are currently hospitalized at the highest levels reported to date, with nearly 30,000 admissions to hospitals in August. No vaccines have been authorized for children under the age of 12, who constitute a large unvaccinated population in the United States.

In an interview with Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times reporter who covers science and global health, Dr Fauci said that “we are still in the midst of a serious pandemic, and it definitely involves children.”

“We are seeing more children in the hospital now because the Delta variant is more easily transmitted between everyone, adults and children,” Dr Fauci said in the interview, published on the Times website Thursday.

Children are still significantly less likely to be hospitalized or die from Covid-19 than adults, especially the elderly. But experts say the growing number of children in hospital, no matter how small compared to adults, shouldn’t be an afterthought, and should instead encourage communities to work harder to protect their younger residents.

Although concerns have grown over the breakthrough infections, which officials admit are not as rare as they had indicated, vaccines continue to offer strong protection against the worst consequences, including hospitalization and death.

Vaccination remains the best way out of the pandemic, experts and health officials have repeatedly said. “The end of the game is to remove the virus,” Dr. Fauci told Axios. “Right now, we are still in pandemic mode. “