Anthony Fauci warns US not 'even at halftime' in fight against coronavirus as number of dead soars
Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases has been at the forefront in fighting the coronavirus pandemic where the COVID-19 outbreak has claimed over 50,000 lives, with over 1 million cases confirmed worldwide.
In the United States alone, there are over 277,000 confirmed cases and over 7,000 deaths from the coronavirus outbreak. Unfortunately, according to Fauci who spoke to Duke University's men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski on his SiriusXM radio show, 'Basketball and Beyond with Coach K', American is not "even at halftime."
While Fauci's appearance on a basketball coach's show might seem odd to many, recent Fauci fanatics know that Fauci aka 'Fauch' was once the captain of the 1958 basketball team at Regis High School in New York.
In the interview filled with basketball analogies, Fauci repeated the same talking points he has stressed in every public appearance he has made over the last month -- that the coronavirus pandemic is incredibly serious and that the United States has a long way to go before winning the fight against it. He also stressed that the only way to save lives and slow the outbreak and get back to normal was through social distancing.
In the interview, Krzyzewski called him 'America’s point guard. 'Fauci has been instrumental in leading the fight against the coronavirus pandemic -- so much so that Krzyzewski asked Fauci when he sleeps.
“It’s not easy, the whole country is being stressed,” Fauci told Krzyzewski. “My job is very stressful. I’ve been going on three or four hours of sleep for a while, then I realized that I can’t do that for an extended period of time.” Fauci stressed that it was an “unprecedented challenge that we’ve never actually seen before.”
When using basketball analogies to describe the current pandemic, Fauci said, "If you want to do the basketball analogy, that right now we have a team that's a very powerful team, and that's the virus, and what we need to do is that we've got to play a full-court press," Fauci said. "I mean, we can't let them get the ball on the ground to dribble. We've just got to be all over them...We're not even at halftime, Coach K."
Fauci continued, "When we put this down on this first cycle, we've got to be much better prepared in the next season - which maybe next fall, next winter, who knows? - that we can never allow it to gain the foothold that it did this first time around."
"Whether we do that with better preparation for testing for identification with a vaccine and even hopefully with some treatments that might actually work, and we'll probably know in the next several months whether we do have any treatments that work," said Fauci who has said in the past that public distribution of a potential vaccine for the COVID-19 virus could be 12-18 months away.
During the interview, Fauci said, “The highest priority is to protect those brave health care workers who are on the front line.” He cautioned that “right now, we just want to hold our own, get to halftime and come out in the second half blazing. Otherwise, this stuff is going to be really, really harmful to us as a society.”
"It's a very formidable foe and that's the reason why we have to pull out all the stops," Fauci stressed. "When we say about trying to make sure we don't facilitate the spread by doing the kind of interactions physically with people in crowds and things like that that can actually promote the transmission as opposed to suppress[ing] it."
However, Fauci also told Krzyzewski that he held optimism, saying, “We are going to get through this. This going to end. We’re suffering terribly, but this is going to end.”