Washington Examiner By Tyler Van Dyke, Breaking News Reporter
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Fauci told the Washington Post Saturday night. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Fauci said the U.S. needs to make an “abrupt change” in its behavior regarding the coronavirus to stop the “dark winter” that many, including Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, have predicted.
According to the New York Times, cases are on the rise in 39 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Another nine states are currently low but are “going up.” The U.S. passed 9 million positive COVID-19 cases on Friday and still has more than 1 million more cases than the second-worst-hit country, India, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. On Saturday, the U.S. reported more than 84,000 positive cases, the sixth day in a row that cases were above 70,000.
Despite advances in treatment such as Regeneron’s antibody cocktail or the antiviral remdesivir improving outcomes for COVID-19 patients — sometimes dropping the death rate as much as 18 percentage points — the sheer number of cases across the country continues to drive the number of reported deaths higher.
“All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors,” Fauci said. “You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Last month, Fauci told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that Trump hadn’t met with the White House Coronavirus Task Force in several months. He said the team was meeting on a weekly basis, and even though Vice President Mike Pence is regularly in attendance, he has less of the president’s attention than controversial coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas. Atlas’s role in the White House was met with backlash from the medical community, given, as a radiologist, he had no training in epidemiology or infectious disease.
“I have real problems with that guy,” Fauci said, referring to Atlas. “He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”
White House spokesman Judd Deere told the Washington Post that Fauci “knows the risks [from the coronavirus] today are dramatically lower than they were only a few months ago.”
“It’s unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and someone who has praised President Trump’s actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics,” Deere said. “As a member of the Task Force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent — exactly what the American people have come to expect from The Swamp.”
Fauci said one silver lining was the progress made in hospitals across the country to better care for and manage patients with the coronavirus.
“Even though we’re getting challenged with more cases,” Fauci said, “the medical system is much better prepared to take care of seriously ill people, so that’s the reason why I think the surge of cases is going to be counterbalanced by better experience.”
