Coronavirus Chief Dr. Fauci Asked if ‘Worst Is Yet to Come’: ‘Yes… Bottom Line, It Will Get Worse’
Trump administration coronavirus point man Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked if “the worst is yet to come” from the pandemic, and responded with an emphatic “yes,” while revealing that the government is still not in a position to know the scope of the outbreak.
Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a respected voice on the coronavirus task force, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee Wednesday morning about the outbreak.
Committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York asked Dr. Fauci, of the coronavirus outbreak, “Is the worst yet to come?”
“Yes, it is,” Fauci replied.
“Can you elaborate?” Maloney asked.
“Well whenever you have an outbreak you can start seeing community spread which means by definition that you don’t know what the index case is, and the way you can approach it is by contact tracing,” Fauci said. “When you have enough of that then it becomes a situation where you’re not going to be able to effectively and efficiently contain it.”
“Whenever you look at the history of outbreaks, what you see now in an uncontained way, and although we are containing it in some respects, we keep getting people coming in from the country that our travel related, we’ve seen that in many of the states that are now involved,” Fauci continued, adding “And then when you get community spread it makes the challenge much greater.”
Fauci went on to say that “we will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now,” and that how much worse it gets depends on “contain[ing] the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside, and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country.”
“Bottom line, it’s going to get worse,” he added.
“Well bottom line, Mr Fauci, if we don’t test people, then we don’t know how many people are infected. Is that correct?” Maloney asked.
“That is correct,” Fauci replied, and said that there are two sorts of testing needed in order to assess the scope of the outbreak: individuals requesting tests and “surveillance where you go out into the community and not wait for someone to come in and ask for a test, but you actively proactively get a test.”
He then revealed that surveillance testing is still incomplete, saying “We are pushing for that,” and that “the CDC is already started that in six sentinel cities and will expand that in many more cities, but you’re absolutely correct, we need to know how many people to the best of our ability are infected, as we say under the radar screen.”
Watch the clip above via NBC News.
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