Fauci warns reopening US too soon could 'backfire'
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top medical expert on the coronavirus pandemic, warned Monday that reopening the U.S. economy too soon could "backfire. Unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not going to happen," Fauci told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview on "Good Morning America."
"If you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you're going to set yourself back," he explained. "That's the problem."
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the United States is currently conducting about 1.5 to 2 million COVID-19 tests per week and is "certainly going to need more."
"We need to get up to at least maybe two times that, three times that," he said. "But we will as we go into the coming weeks."
Fauci noted that tapping into "unused capacity" is equally important, so that states can identify and isolate cases as well as trace contacts.
"What we need to do is make a better connectivity with the tests that are available as well as the capacity that in some cases is not used, through no fault of the governor or the local people," he said. "There's got to be a meeting of the two."
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/coronavirus-updates-us-death-toll-tops-40000-stay/story?id=70237290