“We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it’s not going to be easy,” Fauci said during a panel discussion with doctors from Harvard Medical School. Fauci also warned that we must not underestimate the pandemic’s potential to cause more destruction, reports The Hill.
As the weather gets cooler, Americans will move many activities indoors. The cooler weather also signals the start of the annual flu season. In the Northern Hemisphere, flu season usually begins in October and peaks between December and February, with cases continuing as late as May.
Needless to say, but with the Northern Hemisphere, and in particular, the United States still wrestling with trying to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control, in just a few weeks, we will experience a collision of two diseases, and this will complicate the task of figuring out who is sick with Covid-19 and who is suffering from a less threatening respiratory tract infection.
The strains on the healthcare system will make for one of the “most difficult times that we experienced in American public health,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has said, reports CNN Health.
Dr. Fauci again warned that we should expect to see post-Labor Day surges of the virus, again reiterating something he said last week about heading into the fall with an “unacceptably high” level of COVID-19 cases. “We’re right around 40,000 new cases, that’s an unacceptably high baseline,” Fauci said at the time. “We’ve got to get it down, I’d like to see it 10,000 or less, hopefully less.”
Fauci is hopefully that things will begin turning around once a vaccine is widely available. But the approval for one is still likely months away, despite the President’s claims that a vaccine could be available by Election Day.
Public trust is evaporating
In a new poll conducted by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, it was found that the public’s trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S.’s top doctors, like Anthony Fauci, is rapidly dropping, particularly among Republicans.
According to the poll, released on Thursday,
“Three in four Republicans have at least one misconception, compared to 46% of independents and one in four Democrats. At the same time, trust in some official sources of information on coronavirus has declined since April, including a particularly steep drop in Republicans’ trust of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC.”
The CDC has been widely criticized both by public health advocates, who want the agency to more frequently stand up to political pressure, and by Trump, who has accused it of being overly cautious.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota says, “I think November, December, January, February are going to be tough months in this country without a vaccine.”
And while it is true that scientists had done extraordinarily well in trying to develop a vaccine in record-breaking time, the political overtures put in place by Trump in promising a vaccine by election day may end up back-firing because Americans are leery of a vaccine that is being developed at “warp speed.”
