COVID-19 vaccinations have rolled out for adults and children as young as five across the nation, but coronavirus precautions are still part of our daily lives. When exactly can we get back to “normal”? Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gave his prediction in a pretaped interview at the 2021 STAT Summit on Tuesday.
Dr. Fauci said the clearest indicator will be average daily new coronavirus cases across the U.S. “I think if we can get well below 10,000, I think that would be a level that I think would be acceptable to us to get back to a degree of normality,” Dr. Fauci said. But that figure isn’t set in stone. We may even need to get as low as 3,300 cases per day for us to really feel like we can relax COVID-19 precautions, he explained, adding: “But again, I have to warn the listeners, these are not definitive statements—these are just estimates.”
What would that kind of normal actually look like, though? Because, as is becoming increasingly clear, it’s unlikely that it will be possible to eradicate this virus. Instead, it seems that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, meaning it will continue to circulate at low levels rather than the dangerously high levels many countries are still experiencing. “To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy,” Dr. Fauci said in another conference, Reuters Total Health, on Tuesday. “People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don’t think about it all the time and it doesn’t influence what we do.”
The last time new recorded U.S. cases were at 10,000 per day or lower was March of 2020, and it’s a far cry from where we are now. Over the last week, the U.S. has averaged more than 83,500 new recorded cases every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And cases are rising for the first time in weeks, up 14% from last week, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University. We had been seeing cases decline in the months before that, though that decline was slowing, as SELF has reported.
The uptick in cases concerned Dr. Fauci, who said we could be “in for some trouble” this winter.
How do we turn it around? For starters, around 60 million people are eligible for vaccines but haven’t received their shots. This group is the driver of the current surge, as Dr. Fauci shared on The News with Shepard Smith on Monday. Getting them vaccinated is key to bringing the pandemic to its knees, as SELF previously reported.
“Obviously the people who are most vulnerable are the unvaccinated, but when you have a virus as transmissible as delta, in the context of waning immunity, that dynamic is going to negatively impact even the vaccinated people. So it’s a double whammy,” Dr. Fauci told 2021 STAT Summit viewers. “You’re going to see breakthrough infections, even more so than we see now among the vaccinated.”
But boosters could help keep the virus at bay this winter too. Dr. Fauci believes that boosters will eventually be necessary for all adults. “For me, endemicity means a lot more people get vaccinated, a lot more people get boosted, and although you don’t eliminate or eradicate it, that infection is not dominating your life,” Dr. Fauci said at the Reuters Total Health conference. “Look what other countries are doing now about adopting a booster campaign virtually for everybody. I think if we do that…by the spring, we can have pretty good control of this.”
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