The coronavirus pandemic will not ease up and will likely get worse in the fall and winter, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“I just think we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it’s not going to be easy,” Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said Thursday in a talk with doctors from Harvard University, CNN reported.
Fauci said upticks in the virus are likely as fall approaches and “we do more indoor things.” Noting the U.S. reports about 36,000 COVID-19 cases a day presently, he said that is better than in mid-August when 80,000 cases a day were reported but that the number of cases is still too high.
“I don’t talk about second surges because we’re still in the first surge,” he said, CNN reported. “We’re going to see these surges that we’ve seen in the southern states, in the Midwest and now, if you look at the map, it’s Montana, North and South Dakota, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa. Those are the ones that are surging.”
As of Friday, the United States had roughly 6.4 million coronavirus cases and 192,000 deaths — both tops globally — according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.
