Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert on the White House task force, said mitigation efforts like social distancing are having a “dampening” effect on the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.
“If you look now, we’re starting to see glimmers that that is actually having some dampening effect,” he said Tuesday on CNN, but cautioned that the public has to continue to take the measures seriously.
Fauci noted that New York is in a “difficult situation” and that cases continue to go up. But he said the city opening up the Javits Center to treat people and the arrival of the USNS Comfort to take some of the pressure off hospitals in the fight against the virus “might decompress the surge of cases that they’re having.”
“We hope and I believe it will happen, that we may start seeing a turnaround, but we haven’t seen it yet, we’re just pushing on the mitigation to hope that we do see that turnaround,” Fauci said.
As of Monday evening, the city recorded 38,087 coronavirus cases and more than 900 people have died.
Fauci said once the cases begin to level off, fewer people will be going into intensive care and then there will be a decrease in deaths.
“I don’t want to put too much stock on it because you don’t want to get overconfident,” he said.
“You just want to keep pushing and what you’re doing is starting to see that the daily increases are not in that steep incline, they’re starting to be able to possibly flat now. … Hope it’s going in the right direction, but that’s what we really are trying to attain, that multi-phase component where it ultimately starts to come down,” he added.
Fauci urged people to “hang in there and abide by the mitigation strategies.”
“It’s hard. It’s not an easy thing to do. There’s suffering, and there’s death and there’s massive inconvenience economically and otherwise. But we’re really a strong nation. We’ve been through some amazing things in our history, so let’s all hang in there together, we will get over this and this will end,” he said.