Fauci Warns Against Declaring Victory over Coronavirus Too Quickly — ‘We Can Risk a Surge’

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday cautioned about declaring victory over COVID-19 too quickly.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, warned on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that relaxing health measures could “risk a surge” as is being seen in Europe right now, which he noted is “generally a few weeks ahead of us in the dynamics of the outbreak.”

“If you look at the numbers, they’re still at a level that are really quite risky,” Fauci declared. “We had that major surge over this past winter, where the numbers of cases went up extraordinarily high. We were up to 300,000 to 400,000 new cases per day and up to 3,000 to 4,000 deaths per day. Then it started to sharply decline, which is really good news. It went down very sharply, but now it’s kind of plateaued, you know, anywhere between 45,000, 50,000 and 60,000 per day. That’s much better than the few hundred thousand per day, but it’s still at an unacceptably high level.”

He continued, “[W]e’ve really got to be careful that we don’t claim victory and pull back on all the public health measures that we know work in keeping a lid on these surging of infections. So, although there is good news in the sense of the vaccine continues to get rolled out, we’ve gone between 2 and 3 million per day. That’s very good news. Keeping that up, we are going in the right direction. But if all of a sudden we declare victory, we can risk a surge. They’re seeing that in Europe. In fact, Europe is generally a few weeks ahead of us in the dynamics of the outbreak. And they had a plateauing, and then they pulled back a bit … in their mitigation methods, and all of a sudden, it started to surge again. We want to make sure that that does not happen here in the United States.”

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