Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, warned lawmakers on Capitol Hill Wednesday that the outbreak is “going to get worse.”
“I can say we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the House Oversight Committee after cases in the country soared past 1,000.
“We must be much more serious as a country about what we might expect,” Fauci added. “We cannot look at it and say, ‘Well, there are only a couple of cases here, that’s good.’ Because a couple of cases today are going to be many, many cases tomorrow.”
Fauci also refuted the claim that the virus was no more deadly than the flu or previous outbreaks, such as H1N1 influenza.
“People always say ‘Well, the flu does this, the flu does that.” The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. This has a mortality of 10 times that,” Fauci said.
He added that Americans shouldn’t rely on the virus dying down during warmer weather.
“We do not know what this virus is going to do,” he said. “You would hope that when we get to warmer weather it would go down. But we can’t proceed under that assumption.”
When asked to predict how many cases the country will face, Fauci said that will depend largely on the government’s response.
“I can’t get you a realistic number until we put into the factor of how we respond,” he said. “If we are complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up to many, many millions.”
He said the government’s current efforts are “containing it in some respects.”
But “we keep getting people coming in from the country that are travel-related. We’ve seen that in many of the states that are now involved,” Fauci said.
To turn things around, the government needs to control the number of people who are infected coming into the US and “mitigate within our own country,” Fauci said.
Fauci told the panel if there is a large-scale outbreak, the country is “definitely vulnerable to shortages” of medical supplies and devices.
He asked Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at Health and Human Services, to expand on that issue.
Kadlec said the Food and Drug Administration has been examining the supply chain of pharmaceuticals and drugs coming into the country.
He said he was studying equipment needed to combat the outbreak and that there could be shortages of personal protective equipment for health care workers.
“Much of it is sourced from overseas. Some of it is domestically manufactured. And, yes, we could have spot shortages,” Kadlec said, adding that the government is working with companies to increase their production capacity and trying to obtain supplies from overseas to meet the demand.
“The most important demand is with health care workers, ensuring they have the protection so they can see and treat patients without the risk of getting infected and being lost to the cause,” he said.
With Post wires
