Dr. Anthony Fauci says the spikes in coronavirus cases are “the worst” the U.S. has seen and warned that the virus is showing signs of mutating in a way that makes it easier for the pathogen to spread.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, made the comments at an online event hosted by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“The data is showing there’s a single mutation that makes the virus be able to replicate better and maybe have high viral loads,” Fauci said in an interview with JAMA’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We don’t have a connection to whether an individual does worse with this or not; it just seems that the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible.”
He added that researchers are “still at the stage of trying to confirm that.”
Fauci’s comments come on the heels of a new report published in the journal Cell and led by investigators at Los Alamos National Laboratory that a new strain of the coronavirus has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the pandemic.
The U.S. on Wednesday reported 50,203 new cases, a new daily record, bringing the total to more than 2.68 million. More than 128,000 people have died in America, and more than half a million worldwide.
Fauci during the interview also urged Americans to wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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