Fauci on Trump Claim U.S. Rounding ‘Final Turn’ on Pandemic: ‘I Have to Disagree with That’

Pam Key
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” that President Donald Trump’s prediction that the country has rounded “the final turn” on the pandemic was not correct.
Mitchell said, “I wanted to ask you about something you said Thursday. You said it was time to hunker down because the fall and the winter is, quote, not going to be easy. The president says we’ve rounded the final turn. How do you square those two messages?”

Fauci said, “Well, you know, I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with that, because if you look at the thing that you just mentioned, the statistics, Andrea, they are disturbing. We’re plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day. And the deaths are around a thousand. As we enter —and, you know, we turn the corner after the labor day weekend. I’m hoping that we do not see a surge in cases, as we’ve seen following the Fourth of July and Memorial Day. But when you have a baseline of infections that are 40,000 per day, and you have threats of increased test positivity in certain regions of the country such as The Dakotas and Montana and places like that, what we don’t want to see is going into the fall season when people will be spending more time indoors, and that’s not good for a respiratory born virus, you don’t want to start off already with a baseline that’s so high.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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