Fauci to warn senate of virus death if US reopens too fast

Bloomberg

The nation’s top infectious disease official, Anthony Fauci, was expected to issue a stern warning against reopening the economy too soon during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, saying it risks multiple new coronavirus outbreaks throughout the country.
The US risks “the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” Fauci said in an email to a New York Times reporter ahead of his testimony. Fauci and other health officials — and even the committee chairman — will appear remotely because of potential exposure to the virus.
“If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country,” Fauci wrote. “This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.” Fauci indicated that he will warn against cutting corners on standards set by the administration. These include thresholds such as a “downward trajectory” of documented cases or positive tests “within a 14-day period.”
Amid the sharpest downturn in US history, President Donald Trump has been pressing to begin relaxing the lockdowns that have shuttered businesses despite warnings from some public health experts that doing so too quickly risks a further spread of the virus.
“I want it to reopen safely, but I want it to reopen,” Trump said at a White House news conference, where he and other administration officials insisted there’s enough testing available to support limited efforts to reopen the country.
The circumstances of the Health Committee hearing, which was set to include Fauci as well as Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accentuates the difficulty the US faces as states move to let businesses reopen and encourage consumers to go out and spend.
Plans for the hearing took an abrupt twist when Fauci, Redfield and a third witness — Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn — all said they had come into contact with a member of the White House staff who tested positive for the coronavirus and were in full or partial quarantine.
The panel’s Republican chairman, Senator Lamar Alexander, will lead the hearing from his home in Tennessee, as he’s also in self-quarantine “out of an abundance of caution” after one of his aides tested positive for Covid-19, according to a statement from his office. A fourth witness, Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Brett Giroir, also was expected to testify by video.
The White House has had its own brush with the spread of the virus in unexpected places. Trump said he demanded that everyone entering the West Wing wear a face mask after a White House valet and Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary tested positive for coronavirus infection. Democrats on the committee would be looking to find any daylight between the health officials’ positions and the president’s. Among them is Senator Patty Murray, the panel’s ranking Democrat whose home state of Washington was the first in the US to be hit with a wave of coronavirus cases.