- At this point, no one should to be told what coronavirus tips experts recommend in terms of regular behaviors that people should be practicing to keep themselves and others safe from the virus.
- Nevertheless, Dr. Anthony Fauci at a virtual event on Friday stressed that people need to do at least one thing every day to improve the US coronavirus situation: Wear a face mask.
- In fact, Dr. Fauci encouraged governments and local officials to be as forceful as possible in urging citizens to wear masks.
The steady drumbeat of morose headlines related to the coronavirus pandemic can start to have a deadening effect on you, if you’re not careful. Cases keep going up, Americans are still incredibly limited in what they can do and where they can go, travel outside the US has been almost entirely closed off, and a coronavirus vaccine still feels maddeningly far away. However, as the week drew to a close, federal officials began to stress that there are hopeful signs that we may be turning a corner in the fight against the coronavirus, such as the US Dept. of Health and Human Services asserting that the coronavirus death rate in the US should start to decline in the “next couple of weeks.”
According to Admiral Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary for health at HHS, the seven-day rolling average of coronavirus infections is declining, which is leading US officials to forecast that hospitalizations will drop next week and death rates after that, since those numbers lag the most.
Here’s the thing, though. Whether that turns out to be rosy and overly optimistic or at least somewhat accurate is dependent largely on, well, you. Specifically, on whether the majority of us continue to engage in the best practices that are understood to limit the spread of the virus, like wearing face masks. “Nobody’s letting up their foot from the gas,” Giroir said during a briefing to reporters. “If we throw caution to the wind, go back to the bars, this will all go into reverse.”
Here’s a similarly hopeful vision that White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci shared during a US Chamber of Commerce virtual event on Friday.
“We feel cautiously optimistic that we are on the road — as bleak as it may sound right now — that we’re on the road of getting this under control,” Fauci said, the day after he threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the 2020 Major League Baseball season before the game between the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees.
Continued Fauci: “We will ultimately get back to normal … Sometimes you get so exasperated and run down by (the news), that you think is never going to end. It will end. It will end through public health measures and science, I can tell you, will come to our rescue.”
And here’s how we can speed that process along. Wear. Your. Face. Mask. This is how Fauci says we will get out of this first wave of the pandemic.
“I would urge the leaders — the local, political and other leaders — in states and cities and towns to be as forceful as possible in getting your citizenry to wear masks,” Fauci said Friday. “Physical distancing is the most important, but practically when you’re living your life and trying to open up the country, you are going to come into contact with people. And for that reason, we know that masks are really important. And we should be using them. Everyone.”
