Top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Monday attributed the current surge in coronavirus cases to the United States not having shut down completely to snuff out outbreaks of the disease.
"We did not shut down entirely and that's the reason why when we went up," Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with Stanford Medicine.
"We started to come down and then we plateaued at a level that was really quite high - about 20,000 infections a day. Then as we started to reopen, we're seeing the surges that we're seeing today as we speak in California, your own state, in Arizona in Texas in Florida and several other states."
Senior officials within the Trump administration have told CNN that they do not trust Fauci, nor do they think he has the best interest of President Donald Trump in mind. Others told the network that Fauci is only worried about public health, nothing else.
The Trump administration is trying to downplay the threat of the virus despite the number of cases rapidly rising. There have been more than 40,000 cases every day since June 25. On Friday, a record 71,787 cases were confirmed.
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