Fauci warns against coronavirus indifference among young people
He is concerned young Americans aren’t taking the pandemic seriously.
The nation’s top infectious diseases expert has a stern warning to young people: Don’t get complacent about statistics showing serious coronavirus cases and fatalities are skewed toward the elderly and those with underlying health issues.
“You are not immune or safe from getting seriously ill,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked if younger Americans should be concerned about contracting the virus, which Fauci has repeatedly said is more lethal than the average flu.
“Even though when you look at the total numbers, it’s overwhelmingly weighted toward the elderly and those with underlying conditions,” he explained, “the virus isn’t a mathematical formula. There are going to be people who are young who are going to wind up getting seriously ill.”
In addition, Fauci said it is critical for young people to understand that they can be a carrier for the virus and spread it without showing symptoms or feeling ill themselves.
“Even though you don’t get seriously ill, you could bring it to a person who would bring it to a person that would bring it to your grandfather, your grandmother or your elderly relative,” he said. “That’s why everybody’s got to take this seriously, even the young.”
On every major Sunday morning talk show, Fauci preached the importance of social distancing for containing the spread of coronavirus cases, which have exploded in the U.S. in recent weeks as well as other nations, including Italy, Iran and South Korea.
He and other health officials have pleaded for people to hunker down in an attempt to blunt the spread and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. When asked about crowds still heading to restaurants and bars over the weekend, Fauci said there is serious room for improvement.
“I would like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction that we see in restaurants and in bars,” he said. “Whatever it takes to do that, that’s what I would like to see.”
Some local governments and businesses have stepped up to attempt to force social separation, banning mass gatherings and slashing business hours. The issue was unavoidable over the weekend for scores of travelers who tried to rush back to the U.S. in the wake of a new travel ban by the administration, crowding airports across the country, which Fauci called “unfortunate” and “not what you like to see.”
But where social interaction is able to be avoided, Fauci said, it is imperative to heading off a crisis the likes of which countries like Italy are grappling with.
“Certainly it is conceivable that if we don’t do that you could get as bad as Italy,” he warned. “But I don’t think we’re going there, if we do the kind of things that we’re publicly saying we need to do. We need to be very serious about, for a while, life is not going to be the way it used to be in the United States. We have to just accept that if we want to do what’s best for the American public.”