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- “If you’re talking about getting back to a degree of normality which resembles where we were prior to COVID[-19], it’s going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021,” Fauci said.
- The infectious diseases expert said a vaccine won’t likely be widely available until the middle or end of 2021.
- Coronavirus cases in the U.S. have plateaued around 40,000 daily new cases and 1,000 deaths a day.
White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci on Friday said life may not get back to normal in the U.S. until late 2021 when a COVID-19 vaccine could be widely distributed.
During an interview with MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” the nation’s top infectious diseases expert said he’s confident a vaccine could receive emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the end of this year or early 2021, but it will take some time before it becomes widely available.
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“By the time you mobilize the distribution of the vaccinations, and you get the majority, or more, of the population vaccinated and protected, that’s likely not going to happen to the mid or end of 2021,” Fauci told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
“If you’re talking about getting back to a degree of normality which resembles where we were prior to COVID[-19], it’s going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021,” he said.
Movie theaters, gyms and other public spaces are reopening in some states, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week announced New York City would resume indoor dining with limited capacity on Sept. 30. New York has managed to keep its coronavirus infections rate under 1 percent for more than 30 days.
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Fauci said he had some concerns about restaurants reopening.
“If you go indoors in a restaurant, whatever capacity, 25, 50 percent or what have you, indoors absolutely increases the risk,” Fauci said. “I am concerned when I see things starting to move indoors, and that becomes more compelling when you get into the fall into winter season — when you essentially have to be indoors.”
He said areas that want to get back to being able to sit inside a restaurant should get the community level of infection to the lowest level possible.
Coronavirus cases in the U.S. have plateaued around 40,000 daily new cases and 1,000 deaths a day. Fauci during a panel discussion with doctors from Harvard Medical School Friday said that number is still an unacceptable baseline and he’d like to see the number of daily cases fall to 10,000 or less.
As of Friday, more than 6.4 million people in the U.S. have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 192,000 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
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