Dropping mask mandates ‘risky business,’ Fauci says
With millions of Americans vaccinated and states dropping mask and dining restrictions at the one-year mark of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned Sunday against loosening restrictions prematurely, despite the recent week-overweek decreases in new coronavirus cases.
“Even though the decline was steep, we absolutely need to avoid the urge to say ‘Oh, everything is going great,’ ” said Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, on the NBC program Meet The Press.
“When you get a plateau at a level around 60,000 new infections per day, there’s always the risk of another surge,” he said. “And that’s the thing we really want to avoid, because we are going in the right direction.”
Fauci cited what is happening in Italy, where much of the country will lock down again
Monday, and other parts of Europe. “They had a diminution of cases, they plateaued, and they pulled back on public health measures,” he said. Restaurants and some bars reopened, he said, and “the younger people particularly stopped wearing masks, and then, all of a sudden, you have a surge that went right back up. And that’s where we are right now.”
Rescinding mask mandates in the United States, as some states have already done, is “risky business,” he warned.
Asked on the CNN program State of the Union about questions that remain unanswered a year into the pandemic, Fauci mentioned the effect of coronavirus variants, some of which are more contagious and have emerged in Europe, Latin America and the United States. He said the available vaccines would protect against severe disease, death and hospitalization.
“So, the best way that we can avoid any threat from variants is do two things,” he said: “Get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can, and to continue with the public health measures, until we get this broad umbrella of protection over society, that the level of infection is very low.”
Fauci was asked about recent public opinion polls showing growing public confidence in the vaccines. A new CBS News/ YouGov poll found declining resistance to vaccination among Black and Hispanic Americans, but it identified differences along political lines, with higher rates of resistance among Republicans, especially younger ones.
Overall, 55 percent of Americans in the survey said they would get vaccinated or had already been vaccinated. That included 57 percent of white Americans, 51 percent of Black Americans and 52 percent of Hispanic Americans, the poll found.
By contrast, about 23 percent of Black Americans said they would not get the vaccine; as did 23 percent of white Americans and 20 percent of Hispanic Americans, the poll indicated. On the network’s Face The
Nation program, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, who heads a new federal task force on health equity, called the polling results “great news.” “You see vaccine confidence growing in all groups around the country,” Nunez-Smith said. “It is very promising.”
Even so, polarized attitudes aligned with political affiliation have stiffened: About 71 percent of Democrats said they had been vaccinated or would get shots, while only 47 percent of Republicans said the same. Onethird of Republicans said they would say no to the vaccine, compared with only 10 percent of Democrats.