When speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union this Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top specialist in infectious diseases, admitted what just about every progressive has been thinking when it comes to protection against the novel coronavirus pandemic. The host asked Fauci if he believed that establishing social distancing regulations, as well as and stay-at-home orders, in February instead of March perhaps would have helped curb the number of deaths. In a word: “Obviously.”
"I mean, obviously,” Fauci replied. “You could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.”
Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, told the network: "We look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes, it's not. But ... It is what it is. We are where we are right now."
As The New York Times reported, Fauci, along with other top officials close to the Trump administration, tried to get Trump to implement social distancing measures and non-essential business closures in February. As we know, Trump resisted and resisted.
Tapper and Fauci also talked about the other big issue on everyone’s mind: reentry. It’s “not one size fits all,” he stressed. “We are hoping by the end of the month we can look around and say, ‘OK, is there any element here that we can safely and cautiously start pulling back on.’ If so, do it. If not, then just continue to hunker down.”
“If you just say, ‘OK, it's whatever, May 1, click,’ turn the switch on, obviously, if you do it in an all-or-none way,” Fauci stressed. “There's an extraordinary risk of there being a rebound.”
Fauci also said he hopes, but can’t guarantee, that it will be safe for people to vote in the “standard way” in November. Still, as he pointed out, “there is always the possibility, as we get into next fall and the beginning of early winter, that we could see a rebound."
When asked about a comparison with how South Korea is handling its outbreak, Fauci pushed back, saying it wasn’t quite fair to put the countries up against one another. “They had the capability of immediately, essentially, shutting it off completely in a way that we may not have been able to do in this country,” he stated. “Obviously it would have been nice if we had a better head start, but I don't think you could say that we are where we are right now because of one factor."
Here is the clip that is now going viral on Twitter.
Here is the full conversation on YouTube.
Dr. Thomas Inglesby, an infectious disease expert and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security expressed a similar sentiment about earlier measures when speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday this morning, saying, “If we’d acted on some of those warnings earlier, we’d be in a much better position in terms of diagnostics and possibly masks and possibly personal protective equipment and getting our hospitals ready… It’s possible we would have seen enough disease to get the will to do that in February, and, yes, the earlier we put in place social distancing, the earlier we would have gotten to a peak,” he continued.
Here is that clip.
