Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and White House coronavirus task force member, warned of a “bad week” ahead regarding the coronavirus outbreak during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning.
When asked about President Trump’s prediction that there will be “a lot of death” in the coming weeks, Fauci said “this is going to be a bad week.”
“Unfortunately, if you look at the projection of the curves, of the kinetics of the curves, we’re going to continue to see an escalation,” Fauci said.
However, Fauci hopes that within a week, or perhaps “a little bit more” than that, the curve of infections will start to flatten out and come down with continued mitigation efforts. Fauci also pointed out the need to be prepared for how “things are going to get bad” first and acknowledged that it will be “shocking to some.”
“It certainly is really disturbing to see that,” Fauci said. “But that’s what’s going to happen before it turns around. So we’ll just buckle down, continue to mitigate, continue to do the physical separation because we got to get through this week that’s coming up because it is going to be a bad week.”
After agreeing with CBS’ Margaret Brennan that mitigation is working, Fauci denied that the coronavirus outbreak is under control.
“I will not say we have it under control, Margaret,” Fauci said. “That would be a false statement. We are struggling to get it under control, and that’s the issue that’s at hand right now.”
Fauci then emphasized the importance in recognizing that the increase in new cases will eventually start to flatten out, but warned that we probably won’t see that end result “for days, if not weeks, down the pike.”
“As the cases go down, then you get less hospitalizations, less intensive care, and less death,” Fauci said. “So even though you’re getting improvement in that the number of new cases are starting to flatten, the deaths will lag by, you know, one or two weeks or more. So we need to be prepared that even though it’s clear that mitigation is working, we’re still going to see that tail-off of deaths.”
Watch Fauci’s remarks below:
Fauci: "We are struggling to get it under control and that's the issue that's at hand right now." pic.twitter.com/2rYZHymL1J
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) April 5, 2020
