Fauci: Taking Comfort In Lower COVID Death Rate Is A ‘False Narrative’

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The nation’s top infectious disease expert warned Tuesday against taking comfort in the declining death rate of COVID-19 — just as the President did a few hours earlier.

During an event with Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), Anthony Fauci — director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — called celebrations of the declining death rate a “false narrative.”

“It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death,” Fauci said. “There’s so many other things that are very dangerous and bad about this virus, don’t get yourself into false complacency.” Axios first flagged Fauci’s comments Tuesday.

The remarks contrasted directly with what President Donald Trump has said about the virus: Trump falsely claimed Tuesday that the United States’ COVID-19 mortality rate was the lowest in the world.

The percentage of confirmed COVID-19 cases that end in death is higher in the United States than plenty of other countries.

Still, the mortality rate has decreased over time in the United States. Fauci agreed with a reporter who asked Tuesday whether that was a function of younger people being infected, and of treatment strategies becoming more effective.

“We definitely are better now at treating individuals,” Fauci said. (Responding to the reporter’s third point, Fauci said it has not been established that the virus has weakened over time.)

The doctor also said Tuesday that, unlike other nations, the United States never returned to a “baseline” because of the regional nature of the virus.

“We have peaked at a high level,” he said, staying at around 20,000 new cases confirmed daily for months. That is, until states began attempting to “reopen” their economies, Fauci added. Confirmed new cases have now hovered around 50,000 nationwide for several days in a row.

“We now have a resurgence,” Fauci said.

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  1. I seriously don’t know how he continues to do his job in this “Administration.”

  2. Has a Trump prediction been right on anything regarding COVID 19?

  3. Had a friend today start whinging on how six police officers have died in the line of duty and the media isn’t covering it.

    Countered with, that may be because they’re focused on the 758 people who have died so far today from the virus. We’re losing citizens at a rapid pace and our leadership insists we will just have to live with it. There’s something wrong with that philosophy.

    I’m sure I’ll get lambasted for that, but damn it, it’s true.

  4. I recall a few years ago I investigated police deaths while on duty. Iirc it turned out the the chance of a cop being killed on duty was 3x greater during the Reagan years than Obama years.

  5. He’s probably fairly free to do his day to day job, I’d think. But trying to provide sane leadership in an atmosphere poisoned by Trump’s braying happy-talk nonsense all day every day seems pretty futile. We lost our understanding of what we needed to do, let people congregate with each other too soon, and now a majority of states have rising infection rates that people who understand epidemiology say will be hard to get back under control. I don’t see how Fauci can shout down an entire political party that’s conspiring to politicize and ignore that reality. He’d have to leave that day job to even try, and he doesn’t appear to want to.

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