Fauci blames the surge in viruses for the United States not closing completely

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Chief infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Monday attributed the surge in US coronavirus cases to the country’s inability to shut down entirely, then a rush to reopen too soon and urged a compromise. with the guidelines to eliminate the disease.

He emphasized basic protections, including physical detachment, wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and washing hands. Those things, as simple as they are, can change it. I think we can do that and that’s what we have to do, “he said.

Fauci, who issued firm warnings during the coronavirus surge, encouraged states to follow specific guidelines put forth by White House coronavirus health experts that set different stages to ease restrictions.

“We don’t close completely and that’s why when we went up,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with Stanford Medicine.

“We started to go down and then we stabilized at a really high level: around 20,000 infections per day. Then when we begin to reopen, we are seeing the waves that we see today when we speak in California, their own state, Arizona, Texas, Florida and several other states. ”

Many US states began reopening their economies without meeting the criteria for the guidelines.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well for us,” Fauci said, citing well-publicized incidents of people crowding into bars or not wearing masks indoors.

Fauci said he was confident that the United States would control the virus “if we go back, it does not necessarily have to close again, but to go back a little and then proceed in a very prudent way to observe the guidelines, to go step by step.”