Dr. Fauci: 'Starting to see glimmers of hope'
'There's been a stabilization and decrease in hospitalizations,' says Dr. Anthony Fauci providing an update on the fight against coronavirus
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday that even though “we’re starting to see some glimmers of hope,” the United States needs to “keep pushing on the mitigation strategies.”
Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said on “America’s Newsroom” that those mitigation strategies, including social distancing, need to continue because “there is no doubt that that’s having a positive impact on the dynamics of the outbreak.”
He acknowledged that the number of deaths continues to increase, but noted that at the same time “seemingly paradoxically but not, we’re saying that we’re starting to see some glimmers of hope because the deaths generally lag by a couple of weeks behind what's fueling the outbreak, namely the number of new cases and the number of hospitalizations.”
Fauci referenced the situation in New York, which is currently the U.S. epicenter of the new coronavirus outbreak.
THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK STATE BY STATE
As of Wednesday morning, the state of New York reported the most coronavirus cases and deaths, with 140,386 cases and 5,489 deaths, followed by New Jersey with 44,416 cases and 1,232 deaths and Michigan with 18,970 cases and 845 deaths, according to data compiled by Fox News.
On Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the number of coronavirus deaths in New York has increased by 731 overnight in what has been the largest daily leap yet.
The uptick comes after Cuomo said the figure had been “effectively flat” in the two days prior, with 599 and 594 deaths on Monday and Sunday, respectively.
The governor said that in a bit of “good news," the three-day average of new hospitalizations is down. Admissions into ICU facilities have dropped again as well, while the hospital discharge rate continues to rise.
Fauci stressed that point on Wednesday saying that at the same time that New York has been experiencing an increase in deaths, “there’s been a stabilization and a decrease in the hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care and the requirements for intubations.”
“That means that, as we get further on beyond this week we should start to see the beginning of a turnaround, which is a good sign,” Fauci continued.
He noted that the White House Coronavirus Task Force predicted over the weekend that “this would really be a bad week and it is.”
“It's going to be a bad week for deaths, but driving that and ahead of that is the fact that we will start to see the beginning of a turnaround,” he went on to say.
When host Sandra Smith asked him what are the areas of greatest concern as to where the virus may spread next, Fauci said, “usually a metropolitan area where there is a low level of cases, that's where you really need to intensify the mitigation strategy of the physical separation.”
He went on to say that the hope is that those locations “will not ever turn into a New York or a New Orleans and that's what we’re counting on by essentially, as I say, putting our foot on the accelerator of mitigation."
“Now is not the time to pull back at all, it's a time to intensify,” he said.
Fauci also addressed on Wednesday where the country stands with a coronavirus vaccine. He noted that “we got into a clinical trial very, very quickly, faster than ever.”
He went on to say that “a couple of other candidates are now entered into a phase one safety trial."
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“In general, if you want to do it correctly, it generally takes about a year to year-and-a-half and I mentioned that a few months ago,” he continued.
Fox News’ Greg Norman contributed to this report.