Fauci: We Can’t ‘Learn to Live with’ Covid Until Case Numbers Are Lower than Today’s

EXCERPT:

FAUCI: “Well, you know, when you think about outbreaks of viral illnesses, you know, you have a pandemic and then it decelerates. You can get a degree of control. You might be able to eliminate it or you could even eradicate it. I don’t think there’s a chance that we’re going to eradicate this. We’ve only done that with one virus, and that’s been smallpox. Through very important and effective vaccine campaigns, from this country, we’ve eliminated polio and we’ve eliminated measles, except for an intermittent outbreak in undervaccinated populations. So what I think we’re going to be able to see is not eradication or elimination, but a level of control that’s low enough that it really gets integrated into the regular type of viral infections that we tend to deal with. Parainfluenza, flu, respiratory syncytial virus, if we can get Covid down at that level where it doesn’t really challenge us and threaten us from a public health standpoint, that would be an acceptable, quote, living with the virus. But not at the level we are right now, because we still have 150,000 hospitalizations, 2,000 deaths, and about 700,000 infections. That’s too high a level to accept to be living with. We get it way, way, way lower than that, then I think it would be acceptable to go along and not be disrupted in society."