White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci says that US has the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world, citing the country’s number of infections and deaths.
“Yeah, it is quantitatively if you look at it, it is. I mean the numbers don’t lie,” Dr. Fauci said when CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked him whether the US had the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak.
The US, which makes up for less than 5% of the world population, is at the top when it comes to countries with the highest number of global Covid-19 infections and deaths. The US accounts for more than 22% of coronavirus deaths and more than 25% of infections worldwide as of Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
“Every country has suffered. We, the United States, has suffered ... as much or worse than anyone,” Dr. Fauci told CNN and the Harvard School of Public Health. “I mean when you look at the number of infections and the number of deaths, it really is quite concerning.”
Dr. Fauci recalled that the US did not respond to the coronavirus outbreak in a coordinated effort. The country was able to reduce the cases to a plateau of 20,000 new Covid-19 cases per day, which Dr. Fauci said was not a sufficient “baseline” number and allowed the virus to reemerge in some states as they reopened.
“We can do much better, and we can do much better without locking down, and I think that strange binary approach, either you lock down or you let it all fly, there’s some place in the middle when we can open the economy and still avoid these kind of surges that we’re seeing,” Dr. Fauci said.
Dr. Fauci pointed out that the US must implement a unified response and that the public, regardless of age, must work together to contain the spread of the virus throughout the country.
“Any demographic group that’s not seriously trying to get to the endgame of suppressing this, it will continue to smolder and smolder and smolder,” he said.
"Under control"
However, Dr. Fauci’s remarks do not resonate with President Donald Trump’s suggestion during an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan. The president said that the nation is “lower than the world” in “numerous categories.”
Trump reiterated that the coronavirus pandemic in the US is “under control” amid increasing death tolls from the infection.
“They are dying. That’s true, and — it is what it is,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it,” Trump said in the interview, which took place July 28 and aired Monday night on HBO.
“You really think this is as much as we can control it?” Swan asked. “A thousand deaths a day?”
“First of all, we have done a great job,” Trump said. He stressed how governors have managed the Covid-19 outbreaks in their own states rather than him taking personal responsibility. “I could tell you right now who the great ones are and who the not-so-great ones are. But the governors do it. We gave them massive amounts of material.”
