Dr. Anthony Fauci confirmed at the White House on Monday that new data from New York were showing promising signs of turning around the rise in coronavirus cases.
Fauci cited the number of hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care leveling off in the last three days in New York as positive news. The statistics were also shared Monday afternoon from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“Everybody who knows me knows that I am very conservative about making projections, but those are the kind of good signs that you look for,” Fauci said, adding, “That’s the first thing you see when you start to see the turnaround.”
Fauci notably shared optimism voiced by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Gov. Cuomo about the numbers, but warned the American people not to declare victory prematurely and urged to continue to keep the policies of social mitigation going.
“We hope we are seeing a leveling off in the hottest spots of them all. So we will see,” Trump said, referring to New York during the briefing. “You will see it over the next few days. Let’s see what happens. But we are prepared.”
Fauci said that New York numbers were a key indicator, as deaths from the virus skyrocketed in the region in recent weeks. If Americans continued practicing the federal guidelines, he said, other metropolitan areas could avoid the same high numbers as New York City.
He praised the American people for their efforts and said that social distancing was working.
“I don’t think anyone has ever mitigated the way I’m seeing people mitigate right now,” he said, noting he was “cautiously optimistic” about bringing the number of projected deaths down going forward.
Dr. Brix cautioned, however, that sometimes weekend numbers were “difficult” to interpret properly.
“I want to be clear on that because sometimes case reporting is not as accurate over the weekend so we’ll be watching closely today’s numbers and Tuesday’s numbers,” she said.
Pence also expressed cautious optimism.
“The experts told us that somewhere around the middle of this month would be the peak and as we begin to see a couple of days that might be the beginning of leveling, we’re going to watch that carefully and we’re going to bring that information to the president,” he said.