WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th July, 2020) US states need to slow down their rush in reopening from COVID-19 lockdowns, although shutting their economies completely would not be the answer, the country's top pandemics expert Anthony Fauci said at a live-streamed event.
"We need to get the state's pausing in their opening process looking at what did not work well and try to mitigate that," Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Thursday.� "I don't think we need to go back to an extreme of shutting down."
The United States has been reporting some 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 daily in the so-called "second-wave" of the pandemic outbreak. Fauci said recently the daily case growth could reach 100,000 without proper social-distancing and other safety measures.
"We went from shutting down to opening up in a way that essentially skipped over all the guidelines," he said on Thursday, referring to a code on reopening drafted by the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "That's not the way to go. We've got to rethink that and do it differently."
While the virus was already a "public health person's worst nightmare", Fauci said the US situation was being further complicated by politics - a delicate reference to President Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters' refusal to wear masks and the younger generation's thinking that they have nothing to worry about.
"One of the problems we're facing is that in the middle of trying to fight an unprecedented historic pandemic, there is still divisiveness, politically," said Fauci. "The other thing that's so disturbing in this issue is young people who feel that statistically they are less likely to get significantly impacted. But by getting infected, they are propagating the pandemic."
Data shows that some 3 million Americans have already been infected by the COVID-19, with a death toll exceeding 134,000.� A new model by the University of Washington predicts 200,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States by October 1, casting further doubts on economic reopening from lockdowns.
