- With the coronavirus death toll surging, Dr. Anthony Fauci has emphasized 10 places people should avoid going.
- Aside from bars and restaurants, Fauci has cautioned against going to the gym and attending religious services.
- The U.S. is currently seeing more than 200,000 new coronavirus cases every day, on average.
- The coronavirus death rate has jumped nearly 40% over the last two weeks.
With coronavirus infections still surging, the good news is that vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were both given the green light by the FDA this month. The bad news is that it’s going to take some time before a majority of Americans will actually be able to receive it. In a best-case scenario, Dr. Fauci said that healthy American’s won’t have access to a COVID-19 vaccine until late-March or early April. Consequently, health experts are saying that we may have to wait until the summer of 2021 before we can resume normal day-to-day activities.
In the interim, and especially with the COVID-19 infection and death rate soaring, it’s as important as ever to follow coronavirus safety guidelines. This means that mask-wearing, social distancing, and hand-washing should remain part of everyone’s daily routine. Travel and indoor gatherings should be avoided whenever possible, and you should definitely steer clear of crowded places where the coronavirus can be transmitted easily.
To the latter point, Fauci over the course of the pandemic has emphasized over and over again that certain places should be avoided at all costs. While the entries below aren’t surprising and should strike many as obvious, a reminder can only help as many people continue to grapple with pandemic fatigue.
- Bars
- Restaurants
- Air Travel
- Public Transportation
- Going to the gym
- Crowds
- Indoor gatherings and parties
- Religious gatherings
- Cruise ships
- Outdoor gatherings
Fauci has been warning about the danger of going to bars for months now. During an appearance before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee back in June, Fauci said: “Bars. Really not good, really not good. Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really have got to stop that.”
The seventh point is really worth harping on given that indoor gatherings have been found to be disproportionately responsible for coronavirus outbreaks across the country. In fact, contact tracing data from New York found that 74% of all new COVID-19 cases were the result of household gatherings.
“We need to pay a little bit more attention now to the recirculation of air indoors,” Fauci told JAMA this past summer, “which tells you that mask-wearing indoors when you’re in a situation like that is something that is as important as wearing masks when you’re outside dealing with individuals who you don’t know where they came from or who they are.”
Due to how efficiently the coronavirus can spread in close quarters, Fauci, along with the CDC, have been urging people to hold off on traditional Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations this year. If completely canceling celebrations isn’t an option, Fauci recently stressed the importance of keeping said gatherings as small as possible and ideally in the single digits.
“Ten may even be a bit too much,” Fauci said. “It’s not only the number, it’s the people who might be coming in from out of town. You want to make sure you don’t have people who just got off a plane or a train. That’s even more risky than the absolute number.”
Fauci later added, “You get indoors and you take your mask off because you’re eating and drinking and you don’t realize that there may be somebody that you know that you love who is perfectly well with no symptoms and yet they got infected into the community.”
