Fauci Warns Another Covid Surge Is Very Possible If Mask Wearing, Social Distancing Stops: ‘Plateauing at 50,000 Cases a Day Is Not a Good Place to Be’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the federal government’s infectious diseases agency, warned that the leveling off of daily coronavirus cases could foreshadow another surge if risk mitigation measures like mask wearing and social distancing are prematurely abandoned.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s All In on Friday night, Fauci pointed out that after a steep decline in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths between mid-January and mid-February, the average daily case rate has stagnated at roughly 50,000 to 60,000, a level near the peak of the second outbreak last summer.

“I feel like one of the things we’ve learned is there’s no state of equilibrium,” host Chris Hayes noted. “The thing is either growing or shrinking. When you see it growing in a place I start to get worried. How do you interpret the data out of places like Massachusetts and Michigan where we’re seeing some growth?”

“It’s predictable,” Fauci replied. “Instead of continuing to go down at a sharp line it’s plateaued. Once it’s done that, there’s a high risk of another resurgence. We’ve seen that with previous surges. The other three that we’ve had in this country.”

Fauci then pointed out that Europe has often acted as a leading indicator to the coronavirus patterns here.

“They tend to be three or four weeks ahead of us in the dynamics of the outbreak,”Fauci explained. “They went up, came down, plateaued. They pulled back on the mitigation methods. They stop wearing masks. They opened up the bars. They did the things that we warned shouldn’t be done and now Europe is seeing, in general, a surge of five to ten percent. I hope that doesn’t happen here, but it looks like it’s starting to do that. It’s risky, which is the reason why we say don’t declare victory prematurely. We still have a ways to go, plateauing at 50,000 cases a day is not a good place to be. And that’s where we are. We’ve got to keep pushing to get it down even further.”

Hayes then pressed Fauci on how individual behavior and public policy combine to help or hurt the ongoing fight against the pandemic.

“Even when policy isn’t reducing people’s mobility in a state like Arizona during the summer, we start to see people taking matters into their own hands,” he pointed out. “They stop moving around, they stop congregating, they stop going out, and we see that break the back of the curve, but it works in the other direction, right, I mean what — how much of this is policy and how much is people a year out of this whenever they feel like they can come up for air, like, ‘Alright, I’m going out to live more of my life?'”

“That’s totally understandable when people have been suppressed in what they can do in the normal way of living, that they just feel we’ve got to cut loose,” Fauci conceded, before pointing to the impact of the ramped-up vaccinations. “That’s why you need the leadership to keep encouraging them that we’re not going to be this way forever. We just have to hang in there a bit longer because every day that goes by you get two to three million people more vaccinated and as we get out of March into April and May, a lot more people will be vaccinated, which would make it a lot less likely that you’d see a surge. What we don’t want to do now is to pull back before we get that rather large proportion of people vaccinated. We have now about 23% of the country has at least one vaccine, about 12 to 13% fully vaccinated. We’ve got to get that up a bit higher before we start pulling back on some of these public health measures.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.