“January is going to be terrible,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the White House COVID-19 task force said in an interview with Newsweek on the same day the United States broke some more new virus-related records.
Citing the 37-day holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Fauci said that January could be the worst of the outbreak, which has surged during the second wave of spread.
“At least two to two-and-a-half weeks, maybe even three, between two and three weeks from when the travel (for Thanksgiving) started, that's when you're going to see the peaks,” Fauci told Newsweek. “I hate to say that but it's the truth and the reality. I do see that happening.”
Fauci - who has just accepted President-elect Joe Biden’s offer to serve as his chief medical adviser - warned that some of the data being shared post-Thanksgiving may not be entirely accurate, and there could be a lag between the actual results and the reporting of the actual results, lulling some into a false sense of security.
“If you and I travel and then go home and have family dinners, you're gonna see infections two to three weeks from there and then a week later you'll see more hospitalizations and then two weeks later you'll see more deaths,” he said.
According to Johns Hopkins University, the United States set records for the highest number of COVID-19 fatalities in a single day this week as the number of patients being treated for the virus at hospitals has soared past 100,000, stretching some states’ hospital systems thin.
There have been nearly 14,250,000 million COVID-19 cases reported in America, most in the world, and the only country above 10 million. There have been a total of 277,693 virus-related deaths in the United States since the pandemic began.
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