40 Years of Dealing With Outbreaks, and He’s Never Encountered Anything Like the Present Pandemic

Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, said on Tuesday that COVID-19 had taken him by surprise in an unusual way that helped resulted in one of the biggest global public-health crisis in a generation.

Fauci, who has been the director of NIAID for 30 years and one of the leading experts on pandemics in the United States for the last 40 years, said that he has been "dealing with outbreaks for the last 40 years."

The director also explained during the House hearing on COVID-19 that he has never seen a virus similar to the present coronavirus causing the global pandemic. "That is, one pathogen--with a range where 20 to 40 percent of the people don't have symptoms," he said.

Consequently, public health officials have suggested that people continue to keep a six-feet distance from one another to prevent the infection from spreading.

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Dismissing Criticism

According to a recent study by the University of California, there is a higher "viral load" of COVID-19 "shedding in the upper respiratory tract," even among patients who are pre-symptomatic, which differentiates it from SARS-CoV-1, where duplication takes place primarily in the lower respiratory tract.

During the hearing, Fauci dismissed criticism that federal authorities made a serious mistake by telling the public not to wear face masks during the start of the pandemic, only to contradict that particular decision later on. 

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Wearing Face Masks in Public 

Fauci, explaining the apparently abrupt U-turn in public health policy said that he does not regret the reversal of decision because, during that time, there was scarcity in equipment that health care providers needed.

After two months of confusion over the effectiveness of wearing face masks when New York City turned out to be the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, and just a month after WHO's declaration of the COVID-19 outbreak becoming a pandemic, the federal authorities said all Americans should put on face masks or coverings when in public.

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COVID-19, first identified in Wuhan, China in December last year, has infected more than 9.5 million people worldwide and more than 2.4 million in the US as of this writing. It has killed over 480,000 people globally from which more than 124,000 are from the US.

Meanwhile, investors are working with research companies to help progress in vaccine research for COVID-19. Fauci shared that he hopes that a COVID-19 vaccine could already be developed by early next year.

While he was looking forward to such a development that would possibly kill the virus in 2021, Fauci said that the production of a vaccine to combat COVID-19 could possibly be done by the end of this year.

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