It’s been made clear in recent days that President Donald Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, do not see eye-to-eye on how things should be handled regarding the pandemic. Now, after publicly disagreeing with Trump on potentially getting back to normal once the 15-day “Social Distancing Plan” is up, he’s also expressing that he feels the coronavirus could become a seasonal issue.
“Would this possibly become a seasonal cycle thing? I’ve always indicated to you that I think it very well might,” he said in a press conference. “And the reason I say that, what we’re starting to see now in the southern hemisphere in southern Africa, in the southern hemisphere countries, we’re having cases that are appearing as they go enter their winter season.”
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“And if in fact, they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we’ll get a cycle around the second time,” he continued.
Dr. Fauci then begged the question what this might mean for what everyone is doing now to take care of the crisis, and he responded with, “It totally emphasises the need to do what we’re doing in developing a vaccine, testing quickly and trying to get it ready so what we’ll have a vaccine available for that next cycle.”
“In addition to do the randomized control trial of drugs so that we will have a menu of drugs that we have shown to be effected and shown to be safe,” he added before saying he knows America will be successful in taking control of the virus now, but he feels that the U.S. needs to be prepared for another cycle.
This week, Trump hinted at the idea of potentially resuming as normal once the 15-day “Social Distancing Plan” is over, but Fauci has expressed his distress over lifting things too quickly telling Science, “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” before adding, “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”
Trump announced, “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We are not going to let the cure be worse than the problem. At the end of the 15-day period, we’ll make a decision as to which way we want to go.” He added that he hopes to have the United States “open for business” sooner rather than later.
Photo credit: Alex Wong/Getty.
