Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that he finds President Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings ‘really draining’ as he put a damper on ‘overly optimistic’ White House projections for when the lockdowns could be lifted.
Fauci has become one of the most prominent voices on the White House coronavirus task force, appearing alongside Trump almost every day to deliver information about critical government research he is directing on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking to the Associated Press on Tuesday, Fauci said that his public role is important but conceded that it is difficult to manage on top of his research role with the briefings often dragging on for more than two hours.
‘If I had been able to just make a few comments and then go to work, that would have really been much better,’ he said.
‘It isn’t the idea of being there and answering questions, which I really think is important for the American public. It’s the amount of time.’
Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that he finds President Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings ‘really draining’ in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday
The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Fauci has major influence on the federal government’s coronavirus containment policies.
As Trump and others in the administration weigh how quickly businesses can reopen and Americans can get back to work weeks after the fast-spreading coronavirus essentially halted the US economy, Fauci is adding a dose of caution to increasingly optimistic projections.
In Tuesday’s interview, he warned that the the US does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nation’s economy.
‘We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet,’ Fauci said.
Trump has floated the possibility of reopening some areas by May 1 and said he could announce recommendations as soon as this week.
Fauci said a May 1 target is ‘a bit overly optimistic’ for many areas of the country.
Any easing off the strict social-distancing rules in place in much of the country would have to occur on a ‘rolling’ basis, not all at once, he said, reflecting the ways COVID-19 struck different parts of the country at different times.
Among Fauci’s top concerns: that there will be new outbreaks in locations where social distancing has eased, but public health officials don’t yet have the capabilities to rapidly test for the virus, isolate any new cases and track down everyone that an infected person came into contact with.
‘I’ll guarantee you, once you start pulling back there will be infections. It’s how you deal with the infections that’s going count,’ Fauci told the AP.
Key is ‘getting people out of circulation if they get infected, because once you start getting clusters, then you’re really in trouble,’ he added.
Much of Fauci’s time is focused on analyzing progress on blood tests that aim to tell who was exposed to the coronavirus – whether they knew they were sick or not – by spotting antibodies their immune system formed to fight back.
Those tests will be crucial in determining when and how people can go back to work.
The problem: Most of the tests have not yet been proven to work well, Fauci cautioned. He noted that some countries bought millions of antibody tests only to learn they didn’t work.
Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, said his staff is working with the Food and Drug Administration to validate those tests.
That means proving what level of antibodies it takes to really be immune; if particular types of antibodies are key rather than an overall level; and how long that protection lasts.
‘We’re going to have to find out the answer to all of those questions,’ Fauci stressed.
‘I know people are anxious to say, “Well, we’ll give you a passport that says you’re antibody-positive, you can go to work and you’re protected.” The worst possibility that would happen is if we’re actually wrong about that and those people get infected.
Another complication is that scientists still don’t have a solid understanding of how often people who show either no obvious symptoms or very few symptoms are spreading the virus.
It’s ‘purely a guesstimate’ but no less than 25 percent and no more than half of overall cases may be from the relatively asymptomatic, he said.
Looking ahead, Fauci said a second wave of infection isn’t inevitable.
But he added: ‘If you mean it goes way down and then come September, October, November, we have another peak, I have to say I would not be surprised.
‘I would hope that if and when that occurs, that we jump all over it in a much, much more effective way than we have in these past few months.’
