Fauci wants to assure the American public that this won’t be forever. “We will be pulling back,” he said on the subject of easing restrictions. “We’re now up to about 2 million vaccinations per day. That means every day that goes by, every week that goes by, you have more and more people protected.” Right now, it’s the plateau of new case numbers that has Fauci concerned: The seven-day average for new daily cases of COVID-19 as of Mar. 5 was about than 61,169. Tapper asked Fauci, “When would be the right time to reopen businesses at full capacity? When would be the right time to remove masks?” The doctor’s answer suggested that we need to stay vigilant for a while yet. “Well, I wouldn’t want to see a light switch go on and off with regard to restrictions, Jake. I would like to see, as we get the level of virus in the community to a very low level, well, well below the 60,000 to 70,000 new infections, somewhere—I will just pick a number, even though there’s not a good model there yet—but I would say less than 10,000, and maybe even considerably less than that.” The number hasn’t dropped below 50,000 daily cases since the middle of Oct. 2020, and has been higher than 10,000 new cases per day since mid-March 2020. And for more on where numbers are rising at the moment, check out COVID Numbers Are Now Spiking Again in These 10 States. New variants of the virus are in circulation, including the B.1.1.7 variant from the United Kingdom, which now accounts for 2,672 cases across the U.S. and has been found in 46 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And Fauci said that variant, and the South African variant and Brazilian variant, are one of the reasons he’s worried about our current trajectory. “The other thing that bothers me and worries me somewhat, Jake, is that we have circulating variants in the community. … Some of them have increased capacity to transmit, and some are less protected by the vaccines, which means you want a person to get vaccinated to get that level of antibody high enough, so that you can have a cushion against the variant, if you happen to get infected with the variant,” he told Tapper. “So, there are so many reasons why you don’t want to pull back just now. You want a plan that you will be able within a reasonable time to pull back, but not at a time when we have circulating variants and when you have what looks like a plateauing of the decline in the cases on a daily basis.” And for more on where the variants are spreading fastest, check out These 2 States Are the Biggest Hotspots for the New COVID Strain. The latest evidence indicates the B.1.1.7 variant is between 43 percent and 90 percent more infectious than previous strains of the virus, CNN reports. During the interview, Tapper pointed out those estimates about the U.K. variant’s transmissibility rate and asked, “What might this mean in the U.S.? Are we going to enter a period now where more people are getting infected because of the U.K. variant?” In response, Fauci said, “I believe, if you pull back on public health measures, that possible might become likely. And that’s one of the reasons why I keep saying now is not the time to pull back. Some of the encouraging news, that it looks like the vaccines that are being currently distributed now, the two million or so per day, work really quite well against the 1.1.7. U.K. isolate, as we call it, which means further incentive for people, when their turn comes up, to please get vaccinated.” Fauci reiterated that there are two things Americans can do to “continue a downward trend” in COVID cases: “one, abide by public health measures that I have been talking about and others have, and, two, get vaccinated when your time comes up.” He assured Americans that “we will be able to open up the country, open up the economy. But right now, we want to get that level of virus much, much lower than it currently is.” And for more COVID news sent right to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. Texas and Mississippi announced recently that they were removing mask mandates and loosening capacity limits for businesses. In reponse, Fauci issued a warning to those states during a Mar. 4 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “I would advise the people of Texas and Mississippi to just abide by the public health measures that we talk about all the time: Uniform wearing of masks, physical distancing, avoiding congregate settings, particularly indoors, washing your hands frequently,” he said. “We just have to keep doing that because we know it works.“ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb The chief White House medical adviser also warned that we’ve already seen the disastrous effects that loosening public health restrictions at the wrong time can have. “That’s a bad sign, we’ve seen that before,” Fauci said referencing the current plateau in new cases nationwide. “We’ve seen that last summer when we were trying to so-called ‘open up the economy and open up the country,’ and then we had that really big surge that we don’t want to repeat now. We were going in the right direction. Now’s the time to keep the foot on the accelerator and not pull off because the thing that we don’t want is yet again another surge.” And if you’re gearing up to get vaccinated against the virus, know that The CDC Says Don’t Take This After Your Vaccine Without a Doctor’s OK.
