The United States is at an "unacceptably high baseline" with coronavirus and the numbers must be brought down as the flu season approaches, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.
"We're right around 40,000 new cases [a day]," the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "That's an unacceptably high baseline. We have got to get it down. I would like to see it at 10,000 or less, hopefully less."
Fauci added that he is concerned about heading into the Labor Day holiday weekend, and said he wanted to use his interview to "have a plea to the people in this country" to realize that the nation needs to get its arms around the pandemic and to suppress surges that have been seen.
"You can have an enjoyable weekend, but you can do a couple of fundamental things that we talk about all the time: masks, distance, avoiding crowds, outdoors much more than indoors, washing your hands," said the doctor.
He admitted that it's a "tough kind of messaging" to get people to take precautions when there were events such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and even the Republican National Convention speeches at the White House.
Fauci also on Wednesday said he and other experts do not believe that herd immunity will be a strategic way to defeat the pandemic.
Herd immunity happens when there are so many people who have immunity through vaccination or illness that a virus can't be freely transmitted among them, said Fauci.
"We're not there yet," he said. "We certainly are not wanting to wait back and just let people get infected, so that you can develop herd immunity. That's certainly not my approach. It's certainly not Dr. [Deborah] Birx's approach or any of the other people that I know of on that task force."
Meanwhile, Fauci said he doesn't see the United States being left behind because of the Trump administration's decision not to join with the World Health Organization's global effort for a vaccine, as the United States has at least five or six candidates and there will likely be more.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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