Fauci on Coronavirus Death Toll: “We’ve Done Worse Than Most Any Other Country”

Last updated on February 24th, 2021 at 01:47 am

Speaking on Good Morning America, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading Covid-19 expert, said the high death toll in the United States did not have to happen, though he did not directly assign blame to former President Donald Trump or the Trump administration.

“Five hundred thousand Americans — families grieving all across the country,†said Good Morning America host George Stephanopolous. “Did this have to be?â€

“Certainly some of it, but not this bad,†Fauci said. “I believe that if you look back historically, we’ve done worse than most any other country — and we’re a highly developed rich country.â€

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“There were things back then, if you go back and think about what you might have done — the kind of disparate responses of different states rather than having a unified approach,†he observed. “But it’s so tough to go back and try to do a metaphorical autopsy on how things went. It was just bad. It is bad now.â€

You can watch Dr. Fauci’s interview in the video below.

Just shy of 500,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 since the first death from the novel coronavirus in the country was recorded a year ago, according to a database maintained by John Hopkins University Medical Center.

Yesterday, Fauci warned Americans not to become complacent as infection rates drop and as some scientists have begun to predict that herd immunity could be viable.

“The slope that’s coming down is really terrific — it’s very steep, and it’s coming down very, very quickly. But we are still at a level that’s very high,” Fauci told CNBC, cautioning that the United States is far from “out of the woods.”

“We’re not. Because the baseline of daily infections is still very, very high,†Fauci said. “It’s not the 300,000 to 400,000 that we had some time ago, but we want to get that baseline really, really, really low before we start thinking that we are out of the woods.â€



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