Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that while Covid-19 variants are playing a part in recent spikes in the number of cases, they’re not the only reason.
“The variants are playing a part, but it is not completely the variants,” Fauci said. “What we’re likely seeing is because of things like Spring Break and pulling back on the mitigation methods that you’ve seen now several states have done that, I believe it’s premature.”
Fauci added there is a risk that as numbers come down from a peak and reach a point where new case figures start to plateau, if “you stay at that plateau, you’re really in danger of a surge coming up, and unfortunately that’s what we’re starting to see.”
Fauci said that the US “got stuck” at around 50,000 new cases per day and then went up to 60,000, something which he said is “really a risk.” It has been seen in the US and also in several European countries, he said.
“That’s why we say it really is almost a race between getting people vaccinated and having this peak that we may want to see and we don’t want to see that,” he added. “And again, it isn’t just the variants. Variants we take seriously and are concerned, but it is not only the variants that are doing that.”
