- Each day’s coronavirus update this week has brought new records and foretold more misery, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen.
- In a new interview, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci shared a number of ways people can keep themselves safe as coronavirus cases surge around the US.
- This comes as one estimate projects another 110,000 US coronavirus deaths over the next two months.
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chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta addressed the latest dismal coronavirus statistics for the US during a broadcast on Thursday by calling the pandemic here a “humanitarian disaster — probably one of the worst stories I’ve covered in my career here at CNN.”
That is, of course, no mere hyperbole. For proof, just let the data tell the story. The latest coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins University show that more than 10.4 million COVID-19 infections have now been reported in the US, along with more than 242,000 deaths. On Wednesday alone, there were 1,893 COVID-19 deaths in the US recorded. When experts like White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci talk about the exponential spread of the pandemic and the fact that the pandemic is now more or less out of control in the US, this is what they’re talking about — the US has surpassed 100,000 daily COVID-19 infections for at least nine days in a row. And according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an estimate of more than 110,000 additional COVID-19 deaths is projected for just the next two months alone.
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“Unfortunately, we predicted it, when we were talking about the fact that as we enter into the coolest season of the fall and the upcoming coldest season of the winter, that you’re going to start seeing more indoor activity,” Dr. Fauci told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in a new interview. “And we never got down to a good baseline of infections, which hung around 20,000, then went up to 40 and then 70, and then down to 40,000 again — and now, as you see where, well, over a hundred thousand, and that is really something unfortunate.”
Here’s the thing though. As scary as these numbers sound — and not just the numbers, but the return of news reports ominously describing things like mobile morgues in the Texas hotspot of El Paso — Fauci has also been trying to convey a bit of hopefulness. As in, the scary, terrible winter of the pandemic that experts have been forecasting for a while now is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. Or, rather, it doesn’t have to be.
Want to avoid the latest coronavirus surge and keep yourself safe? Here’s how to do it, straight from Dr. Fauci.
This next part should actually be a bit anticlimactic, since it’s not as though we’re about to share a huge new revelation from the doctor. Call them the Fauci fundamentals — the things he’s been preaching since the start of the pandemic. These are what he wants people to double-down on now: Wear a face mask; stay outdoors as much as possible when you’re in settings away from home, such as eating at a restaurant; avoid crowds; and stay physically distanced from other people.
“We can blunt the surges that we’re seeing,” Fauci said. “It’s possible to do. And we will be able to do it. We just need to do it — put the effort in and just hang in there because the vaccine … it’s right around the corner.”
