When will the pandemic officially be over? According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. coronavirus infection rate needs to be 10 times lower than it is right now to end the pandemic.
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During an interview with Axios, Fauci shared this, saying that the country is struggling after a surge in COVID-19 cases due to the Delta variant that began late this summer. In total, the U.S. is seeing about 160,000 new cases a day with "not even modestly good control," he said.
Fauci shared that more Americans need to get vaccinated for this outbreak to get better and infections to go down.
"The endgame is to suppress the virus," Fauci said. "In a country of our size, you can't be hanging around and having 100,000 infections a day. You've got to get well below 10,000 before you start feeling comfortable."
While vaccinations will not directly correlate with the end to new infections, Fauci said that "[the country is] not going to have it as a public health threat."
He said that variants are still something to be cautious of, but they remain controllable with current vaccines. The longer it takes to end the pandemic, the more the chance of a "monster variant" emerging, which eludes vaccines, grows, he said.
Currently, 54% of the population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, with 63.4% having received at least one shot.
