America's most famous doctor at the moment, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is warning the public that the surge in COVID-19 cases is only going to get worse after Thanksgiving travel last week.
Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been the foremost expert and the public 'face' of the pandemic since the coronavirus hit earlier this year. He did a chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday and said the country is not in a good place at the moment, with positive test cases averaging more than 100,000 a day since November 3.
"Because of the travel and people congregating for meals, et cetera, you don't see any difference for a day, two, three, five days," he said. "You'll see the difference two or three weeks from now, which would put it right at the time that people would be traveling for Christmas."
Fauci stressed that people still need to follow the Centers for Disease Control's suggestions for mitigating the virus by wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds, doing activities outdoors instead of indoors and washing hands.
With at least two vaccines on the way from Pfizer and Moderna that could start to be distributed as early as this month, Fauci cautioned that it could still be well into the spring and summer before everybody is able to be vaccinated, and urged people to keep their guard up.
"We have it within our power to get ourselves through this until we ultimately get a vaccine," Fauci said. "The infection in the community level now is driven by people who are without symptoms, because about 40 to 45 percent of the people who are infected have no symptoms. We know that a substantial proportion of the people who get infected, get infected from someone who doesn't even know they're infected."
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