Have to assume pandemic is going to get worse: Fauci

WASHINGTON: Anthony Fauci, America’s top expert of infectious diseases, has said people in the US, currently the world’s hardest-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, have to assume that the health crisis is going to get worse in the wake of an unabated spike in the number of fresh cases, deaths and hospitalisations.

Fauci’s comments on Tuesday came after the US registered a record high 65,000 deaths in the past 28 days, making December the worst month for coronavirus fatalities since the start of the pandemic. December’s figure, roughly equivalent to over 1.6 Americans lost to the virus every minute, marked a significant surge from that in the entire month of November which registered 36,964 fatalities.

The country’s overall the overall death toll currently stood at 338,544, the highest in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins University. Reacting to the grim developments, Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN: “I hope we don’t just get to that level of continually seeing over 200,000 because, as you know, it staggers. You get cases, you get hospitalizations and then you get deaths.

“It’s highly predictable that once you increase in those number of cases in a staggered way every couple of weeks, you get increase in the number of hospitalisations.”

According to the top health expert, the country’s unabated resurgence has “gotten out of control in many respects”. “It really is very, very difficult to do effective identification, isolation and contact tracing” due to the surges, he told CNN. As of Wednesday morning, the US, currently the hardest-hit country in the world by the pandemic, has registered a total of 19,548,706 confirmed coronavirus cases, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

On Tuesday, the country reported 124,686 coronavirus patients in hospitals, the most reported on a given day during the pandemic, according to the Covid Tracking Project. The US’ proportion of ICU patients who have coronavirus also has shot up, from 16 per cent in September to 40 per cent last week, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.