There are signs that social distancing policies intended to slow the coronavirus outbreak may be starting to have an impact on the number of cases in the United States, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN on Tuesday.
“We're starting to see glimmers that that is actually having some dampening effect,” Fauci said. “But that does not take away from the seriousness” of the situation.
“We are still in a very difficult situation,” he said. “We hope, and I believe it will happen, that we may start seeing a turnaround, but we haven’t seen it yet. We’re just pushing on the mitigation to hope that we do see that turnaround.”
Fauci stressed that “You don’t want to get overconfident. You just want to keep pushing,” adding that the the number of cases continues to go up, and that the upcoming weeks are a “critical time.”
Fauci encouraged the public to “hang in there and abide by the mitigation strategies.”
“It’s hard. It’s not an easy thing to do,” he said. “There’s suffering, and there’s death and there’s massive inconvenience economically and otherwise. But we’re really a strong nation. We’ve been through some amazing things in our history, so let’s all hang in there together, we will get over this and this will end.”
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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