- Dr. Fauci doesn’t believe life in the U.S. will return to normal until sometime in 2021, at the absolute earliest.
- Fauci also said that the U.S. won’t return to a pre-coronavirus way of life until a majority of Americans receive a vaccine.
- With COVID-19 still spreading rapidly across many states, a group of doctors recently penned a letter urging lawmakers to institute a second shutdown.
The scary thing about the coronavirus pandemic, aside from the fact that it’s still spreading rapidly across dozens of states, is that the situation may get a lot worse once fall rolls around. Once the weather cools and flu season kicks into high gear, doctors believe that a surge in new coronavirus cases is likely.
At the same time, the odds of researchers coming up with an effective coronavirus vaccine before the end of the year is looking slim. While early clinical trials involving potential coronavirus vaccine candidates have been promising, it’s starting to look like we won’t’ have a vaccine ready to go until early 2021 at the absolute earliest. Consequently, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently said that life in the U.S. won’t return to normal until next year, even in a best-case scenario.
“The timetable you suggested of getting into 2021, well into the year,” Fauci told CBS News, “then I can think with a successful vaccine — if we could vaccinate the overwhelming majority of the population — we could start talking about real normality again. But it is going to be a gradual process.”
With work on a coronavirus vaccine ongoing, the encouraging news is that there’s an unprecedented and concerted effort amongst researchers to develop a vaccine for a single virus.
Touching on this point, Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health recently said:
I have never seen anything come together this way, as we have tried to do and are now doing, for the development of vaccines. And the government, by providing additional resources, has also made it possible now to plan manufacturing of vaccine doses even before you know if the vaccine is going to work.
Though work on a coronavirus vaccine has been promising thus far, an effective vaccine is by no means a guarantee. In a worst-case scenario where researchers are unable to develop a vaccine, Fauci earlier this month said that the coronavirus could end up rivaling the Spanish Flu in terms of severity. Recall that the Spanish Flu devastated the globe and killed upwards of 50 million people in the early 1900s.
“If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died,” Fauci said, “that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don’t even approach that with [COVID-19] but it does have the makings of, the possibility of approaching that in seriousness.”
Currently, the U.S. has seen more than 4 million coronavirus cases which have resulted in nearly 150,000 deaths.
