KUALA LUMPUR, October 11 — American infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci has warned that the United States should not celebrate too early by declaring a premature victory against the Covid-19 pandemic as new cases recede ahead of Halloween festivities.
While recent declines Covid-19 infections, hospitalisations, and deaths suggest that the US was headed in the “right direction”, Dr Fauci noted that there are still around 68 million people in the country who are eligible to be vaccinated who have yet to be inoculated.
“Even those who have been vaccinated, I mean you you want to look forward to holiday seasons and spending time with your family and doing those sorts of things. But don’t just throw your hands up and say it’s all over,” Dr Fauci CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
“If you look at the history of the surges and the diminutions in cases over a period of time, they can bounce back. So we don’t want to always, you know, be on our edge that it’s going to happen because it won’t if we do what we should be doing, namely particularly getting more people vaccinated.”
When asked how long it might be before vaccinated Americans could safely take off masks indoors, Dr Fauci said: “I need to see the dynamics of the outbreak in the community go way down.
“Even though we just said it’s going in the right direction, we have less than 100,000 cases a day, it’s about 95,000 as the seven-day average. That’s still way too high. We want to get way, way down. I mean I’d like to see it well below 10,000 and even much lower than that.
“But when you’re at 95,000 that’s still a situation where you have a high degree of dynamic circulation of virus in the community.”
