Testifying before Congress, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that the public that the U.S. has yet to see the worst impact of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Whenever you have an outbreak in which you can start seeing community spread, which means by definition that you don’t know what the index case is and the way you can approach it is by contact tracing — that when you have enough of that — then it becomes a situation where you’re not going to be able to effectively and efficiently contain it.”
Contrary to earlier assertions by the administration that COVID-19 had been contained, Dr. Fauci noted that “although we are containing it in some respects, we keep getting people coming into the country that are travel-related; we’ve seen that in many of the states that are now involved. And then when you get community spread, it makes the challenge much greater. So I can say we will see more cases and things will get worse than they right now. How much worse wiill depend on our ability to do two things: to contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country.”
“Bottom line,” said Dr. Fauci, “it’s going to get worse.”
Later, responding to a question about the gravity of the risk of coronavirus posed by Congressman Michael Cloud, of Texas, Dr. Fauci noted that coronavirus is “ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”
You can view Dr. Fauci’s testimony and those of other health officials by going to the following URL on C-span.org:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4860453/infectious-diseases-head-warns-coronavirus-outbreak-worse
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