Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Thursday that partisanship is hurting the US response to Covid-19 in his latest blunt assessment of the country’s handling of the pandemic.
“You have to be having blindfolders on and covering your ears to think that we don’t live in a very divisive society now, from a political standpoint,” Fauci said on “Podcast-19,” FiveThirtyEight’s podcast on Covid-19.”I mean, it’s just unfortunate, but it is what it is. And you know, from experience historically, that when you don’t have unanimity in an approach to something, you’re not as effective in how you handle it. So I think you’d have to make the assumption that if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have a more coordinated approach.”
His comments come as many states are pausing or rolling back their reopening plans while grappling with record-breaking spikes in the virus. At least 33 states have trended upward in average daily cases — an increase of at least 10% over the previous week.
Fauci said that some parts of the country are doing “really well” at managing the pandemic, including communities where people follow the public health guidelines and have opened gradually.
“But as a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”That message continues to be at odds with President Donald Trump, who boasted in an interview with Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren that “we are in a good place” with the outbreak.”
Dr. Fauci said don’t wear masks and now he says wear them. And he said numerous things. Don’t close off China. Don’t ban China. I did it anyway,” Trump said. “I didn’t listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape.””We’ve done a good job,” he continued. “I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks, by the time we next speak, I think we’re going to be in very good shape.”
Right:
Here’s one of the exact quotes from 538:
On why we’re seeing a surge in cases:
Anna Rothschild: So are you saying that in these states, are you saying that it’s a mix of politicians not following guidelines and people not following orders?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Yes. It is both. I mean, it’s not a unidimensional thing. It’s complicated. There are some governors and mayors that did it perfectly correctly. They stayed exactly. They wanted to open up, so they went through the guidelines of opening up their state. But what happened is that many of the citizenry, said, “You know, well, I’m either going to be locked down or I’m going to let it all rip.” And you could see from just looking, documented on TV and in the papers of still photos of people at bars and congregations, which are a perfect setup, particularly if you don’t have a mask. Yeah, then there are some times when despite the guidelines and the recommendations to open up carefully and prudently, some states skipped over those and just opened up too quickly.
AR: Do you think that Florida and Arizona opened up too quickly?
AF: You know, I think in some respects, in some cases, they did not always. But I think that that certainly is contributing to that. Certainly Florida I know, you know, I think jumped over a couple of checkpoints.
Those states were openly defiant of the guidelines. But let’s face facts. It’s pretty clear that California is full of defiant assholes as well. They shut down here until June and opened slowly and deliberately. But when they opened anything everyone just acted like it was all over. And now it’s exploding.
How many people would have to die for people to take this seriously? A million? I honestly don’t know.