COVID-19 infection rates in the United States are ten times the rate they need to be in order for the pandemic to end, chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci told Axios in an interview published on Thursday.
“In a country of our size, you can’t be hanging around and having 100,000 infections a day. You’ve got to get well below 10,000 before you start feeling comfortable,” Fauci told Axios.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the seven-day moving average for cases is currently around 140,000.
With current infection rates as high as they are, Fauci said to Axios, “That’s not even modestly good control … which means it’s a public health threat.” He added that “we’re still in pandemic mode.”
Fauci said that when enough people have become vaccinated “you’ll still get some people getting infected, but you’re not going to have it as a public health threat.”
As of Thursday, at least 73 percent of the U.S.’s eligible population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, with 62.4 percent fully vaccinated. But just 53 percent of the country’s total population is fully vaccinated.
Fauci, the country’s leading expert on immunology, said that while available vaccines have been effective, not enough people are taking steps to protect against the delta variant.
He also warned that the longer the pandemic is allowed to rage on, the higher the chances are that a “monster variant” that is stronger than the vaccines will occur.
Immunology experts have repeatedly stated that as long as large groups of people continue to contract COVID-19 and harbor it in their systems, mutations like the delta and more recently identified mu variant will occur, increasing the chances of a vaccine-resistant strain occurring.