The United States should start to see the "beginning of a turnaround" with coronavirus after this week, but as for now, "it's going to be a bad week for deaths," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday.
"We need to keep pushing on the mitigation strategies because there is no doubt that that is having a positive impact on the dynamics of the outbreak,” Fauci said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." “Now is not the time to pull back at all. It’s the time to intensify.”
However, there are some "glimmers of hope," even while the numbers of deaths on a given day are continuing to increase, as the deaths come to a few cases behind the number of new cases resulting in hospitalizations, said Fauci, and those are dropping.
"What we are seeing now from New York, over the last few days there has been a stabilization and a decrease in the hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care and of the requirements for intubations," said Fauci. "That means that, as we get further on beyond this week, we should start to see the beginning of a turnaround which is a good sign."
The increase in deaths, though, are sobering, said Fauci, and "we predicted over the weekend that this would really be a bad week."
Meanwhile, new models are predicting far fewer deaths than the 100,000 to 240,000 that had been projected two weeks ago, and Fauci said there is no doubt in his mind that is because of social distancing.
"When you have models that project what the number of deaths are going to be or the number of hospitalizations, a model is as good as the assumptions that you put into the model," said Fauci. "You can get numbers that are far different than what the reality is . . . when you continue to regulate real data, you go back and modify the models."
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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