Anthony Fauci sounds the alarm about the “disturbingly high” level of the new COVID-19 cases

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, once again warned on Thursday about complacency in the battle against COVID-19 as he expressed concern about the “disturbingly high” level of new daily infections in the United States. .

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and senior medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper how coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations are currently declining.

“But the number that worries me, Anderson, is the number of cases every day,” he said. “When we had the big rise that we have commented so many times that it reached up to two or three or more hundreds of a thousand cases a day, then it fell again. But now it is at a highly disturbing level. “

Currently, the new daily infection rate is around 60,000.

“When it is at this level, there is a risk of increasing the rise again,” Fauci warned. “So, as we’re looking at it now, it’s almost a race between vaccinating people and this wave that seems to want to rise and do what’s happening, for example, in Europe, where there are now some really quite alarming rises.”

Fauci noted that between three and four million people receive COVID-19 in the United States every day, with more than a third of the population receiving at least the first dose.

“Therefore, if we could, as I have said so many times, stay a little further to get more and more people for millions of vaccinated people to the point that we will have enough vaccinated people that the risk of this wave will decrease a lot,” he said. dir Fauci.

Now it was about withdrawing vaccines and “not withdrawing public health measures,” he added. “Now is not the time, as I have said so many times, to declare victory prematurely. There we still have a considerable risk that we have to overcome. “