Dr. Fauci: ‘It’s Possible’ Hundreds of Thousands or Even Millions of Americans Could Die of Coronavirus

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

KEILAR: “And joining me now is a leader on the president’s Coronavirus task force, The Nation’s top infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.”

FAUCI: “Good to be with you.”

KEILAR: “One week ago we were reporting 19 deaths, 490 infected. Today, almost 60 deaths. There have been estimates of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. Who could die or in the worst case scenario, millions. Can you tell the American people that that is possible?”

FAUCI: “You know, it’s possible because when you do a model, you have a worst case scenario, the best case scenario, and the reality is how you react to that will depend where you’re going to be on that curve. So obviously we are clearly going to have more infections. There’s going to be more problems with regard to morbidity and mortality. The challenge we have right now is how do we blunt that. I’ve said many times if you just leave it alone and let the virus to its own devices, it will go way up and come down naturally over a period of several weeks. Unfortunately for our colleagues in Italy and France and certainly in China, that’s what happened. Our challenge right now is to do two things, is to prevent the new influx of cases, hence the travel restrictions, and for what we’re dealing with right now, is to know that we’re going to get more infections but blunt it so that we don’t have that sharp peak, so we have a smaller hump. Even with that we’ll have people getting infected but we need to try to get there as opposed to there.”