Fiji Sun

COVID-19 PANDEMIC

FAUCI: STATE OF VIRUS IN U.S. IS ‘NOT GOOD’

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Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious­diseases expert, warned “the current state is really not good.” “We had been in a situation [where] we were averaging about 20,000 new cases a day,” said Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In a livestream with Director the U.S. National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, Mr Fauci said a series of circumstan­ces associated with various states and cities trying to open up, in the sense of getting back to some form of normality, has led to a situation where the country now has record-breaking cases.

He said the average age of people getting infected now is 15 years younger than it was a few months ago, but young people must understand they are not “in a vacuum.”

“Innocently, they could infect someone who’d infect someone, and then all of a sudden someone’s grandmothe­r or grandfathe­r, or aunt who’s getting chemothera­py for breast cancer gets infected,” Mr Fauci said.

“You’re part of the propagatio­n of the pandemic so it’s your responsibi­lity to yourself, as well as to society, to avoid infection,” Mr Fauci said.

More than 2.9 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the United States with the fatalities surpassing 130,100 as of Monday evening, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

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 ?? Photo: Xinhua ?? Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labour and Pensions on COVID-19 at Washington, D.C., the United States, on June 30, 2020.
Photo: Xinhua Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labour and Pensions on COVID-19 at Washington, D.C., the United States, on June 30, 2020.

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