Another 500,000-plus people in the US could die of Covid-19 between now and April, Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
Speaking to CNN during its global coronavirus town hall, Fauci said the number of US fatalities could get as bad as that predicted by a reliable model from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
That model predicts another 539,000 people could be killed by the virus.
“We have a number of conflating events occurring,” Fauci said. “We have the surge that we know has gone on before the Thanksgiving holiday — that very steep inflection of cases that has led to the record numbers.”
Fauci said the US was yet to see the effects of any Thanksgiving holiday-related surge.
“That may peak two to three weeks from now, and they will cusp at the Christmas holiday,” Fauci told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We are really very concerned if you take the Thanksgiving surge, the Christmas surge — by the time you get to December and the beginning of January, we very well could see the numbers you just mentioned.”
However, Fauci said the country could stem the tide if the public wears masks, practices social distancing and avoids crowds.
“Those simple things alone, despite the enormity of the problem, can make a difference. Because it has been proven it does make a difference,” he said. “So we all need to pull together to do that because as I’ve said so many times, help is on the way. Vaccines are imminent. We will be starting to get vaccine doses in people’s arms by the middle and end of December, and then more in January.”
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