Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for three decades and one of the leading experts on pandemics in the United States for the past four decades, spoke a few harsh words to public and federal authorities in the United States.
Fauci said that SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the new coronavirus that causes the disease known as COVID-19, will continue to spread unless everyone intensifies their game. He spoke Tuesday at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Work and Pensions in Washington, DC, along with other government officials, including Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fauci said that many states have reopened too quickly and that people are not complying with the rules of social distancing. “What we saw was a lot of people who maybe felt that because they think they are invulnerable, and we know that many young people are not because they are receiving [this] serious illness; therefore, they are getting infected has nothing to do with anyone else when, in fact, it has, “Fauci told the Senate committee.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which was first identified in Wuhan, China in December, had infected 10,424,992 people worldwide and 2,534,981 in the United States as of Tuesday. It had claimed at least 509,706 lives worldwide, 129,545 of which were in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The Dow Jones DJIA Industrial Index,
and the S&P 500 SPX,
they were slightly higher on Tuesday, despite the increase in coronavirus cases in some of the most populous states in the United States, including California, Florida and Texas.
“What has happened, I suppose understandably, but unfortunately, is that people took the ‘all or nothing’ attitude in some places,” Fauci said previously on CNN. “Either you are locked up, or you just let it fly, and you ignore many of the physical distancing guidelines of wearing a mask … not wearing a mask, avoiding crowds.”
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“We need to open up again, without a doubt, we want to recover the economy, but it has to be done in a measured way, and now we are seeing the consequence of the spread of the community, which is even more difficult to contain.
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“You see images on television that, even in states that tell their citizens to do it correctly, they are doing it,” Fauci told CNN on Monday. “There are crowds, they are not physical distancing and they do not wear masks. That’s a recipe for disaster. “
“We need to open up again, without a doubt, we want to recover the economy, but it has to be done in a measured way, and now we are seeing the consequence of the spread of the community, which is even more difficult to contain than to spread it in a physical place known as a prison or a nursing home or a meat packing place. “
He added: “When you have community spread, it is insidious, because there are many people in the community who are infected, but are asymptomatic. It is extremely problematic to keep track of contacts efficiently, because most infected people don’t even know they are infected. So how do you trace contacts when someone doesn’t have any symptoms?
Fauci said the United States government has not done well with tracing contacts, the process of tracing people who have been in contact with someone who has the virus and has ordered them to stay home for 14 days. . “I don’t think we are doing well, for various reasons, and not all of them are the fault of the system.” Elizabeth Cohen, who interviewed Fauci for CNN and interviewed him for several years, said the doctor appeared “frustrated” by the lack of urgency to take the latest waves seriously.
In Cohen’s interview, Fauci said some people close to the border are reluctant to give authorities names to track, while other names given to health authorities “are lost in confusion. That is a very difficult situation. , very difficult. In that we must improve. ”
In states where the spread of the coronavirus is increasing, such as Arizona, Texas, Florida and California, he said, “20% to 40% of infected people have no symptoms, so the standard, classic paradigm of identification, isolation , contact tracking doesn’t work, no matter how good it is, because you don’t know who you’re tracking. ”
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‘Between 20% and 40% of infected people don’t have any symptoms, so the classic, classic paradigm of contact identification, isolation, and location doesn’t work, no matter how good it is, because it doesn’t know who you’re tracking.
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Fauci previously said that that was the biggest threat and surprise about COVID-19. “I have been dealing with viral outbreaks for the past 40 years. I have never seen a single virus, that is, a pathogen, that has a range where 20% to 40% of people have no symptoms, “he said last week during a hearing by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Trump administration’s response to the new coronavirus pandemic.
According to the head of the World Health Organization, the coronavirus pandemic “is not even close to being over,” and the worst is yet to come, in what was a grim assessment of the state of affairs some six months after it produced the first cases. reported in China. “Six months ago, none of us could have imagined how our world, and our lives, would be affected by this new virus,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists at a press conference on Monday. “The pandemic has brought out the best and worst in humanity.” Tedros said the WHO will send a team to Wuhan, China next week to work on the origins of the virus.
Currently, the WHO estimates that 16% of people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic and can transmit the coronavirus, while other data shows that 40% of coronavirus transmission is due to carriers showing no symptoms of the disease. . As a result, public health officials have advised people to keep a distance of 6 feet from each other.
A recent study from the University of California, San Francisco found that there is a large burden of SARS-CoV-2 detachment in the upper respiratory tract, even among pre-symptomatic patients, “which distinguishes it from SARS-CoV-1, where replication occurs mainly in the lower respiratory tract. ” Such viral load makes detection of infection based on symptoms less effective in the case of SARS CoV-2, he said.
After two months of obfuscation over the effectiveness of face masks, during which New York City became the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, and one month after the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak. Like a pandemic, federal authorities in the United States said that all Americans should, after all, wear face covers in public places.
Fauci has said he was hopeful that a coronavirus vaccine could be developed in early 2021, but said a vaccine is unlikely to provide 100% immunity; He said the best realistic result, based on other vaccines, would be 70% to 75% effective. The measles vaccine, he said, is among the most effective in providing 97% immunity.
How COVID-19 is transmitted
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