“We need to pay more attention to this. We seem to forget that we’re making progress, we’re doing better, and then we kind of let go and we go back again,” Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine who specializes in infectious diseases, told CNBC on Friday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, has warned for weeks that the daily number of new cases has remained “unacceptably high” heading into the end of the year. However, it’s not too late to “vigorously apply” recommended public health measures, such as wearing a mask and maintaining a physical distance from others, Fauci told Johns Hopkins University on Thursday.
When the U.S. descended from its first peak in April, the number of new coronavirus cases “got stuck” around 20,000 per day, Fauci said. Ideally, the U.S. would’ve reported less than 10,000 cases every day, he said.
Then cases resurged. The number of daily new Covid-19 cases swelled to a high of nearly 70,000 cases a day before subsiding once again. However, new cases have since hovered between 40,000 to 50,000 cases a day.
“You can’t enter into the cool months of the fall and the cold months of the winter with a high community infection baseline,” Fauci said. He added that the positivity rate, or the percentage of tests that are positive, is “going in the wrong direction” in more than 30 states.
— CNBC’s Will Feuer and Nate Rattner contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/17/us-reports-highest-number-of-new-coronavirus-case-since-late-july.html
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