Fauci: Current virus plateau 'unacceptable'
Source: The Hill
BY ZACK BUDRYK - 03/07/21 11:13 AM EST
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, described current coronavirus levels of 60,000 to 70,000 new cases per day as “unacceptable.."
Fauci said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he is concerned that cases have begun to plateau after coming down "very sharply" of the past week or so.
“Historically, if you look back at the different surges we’ve had, when they come down and start to plateau at a very high level… plateauing at a level of [60,000] to 70,000 new cases per day is not an acceptable level, that is really very high.”
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head added that Europe, which is “usually a couple of weeks ahead of us in these patterns,” saw its numbers plateau before “about a 9 percent increase in cases.”
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Link to tweet
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/542005-fauci-current-virus-plateau-unacceptable
= new reply since forum marked as read
the subsequent "plateau" seems to end up happening at a higher level than the previous plateau that preceded a peak. So for example -
(from here - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102816/coronavirus-covid19-cases-number-us-americans-by-day/)
-AND-
(from here and apparently their "final" report - https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/our-final-week-this-week-in-covid-data-mar-4)
Because the virus is so wide spread, I wouldn't expect it to go to zero anytime soon but I think the hope was that it would at least drop back to the plateau level just prior to this last peak, but that hasn't happened yet. And apparently there is a concern that with the lifting of mandates and literal throwing open of businesses, plus the use of a vaccine, prompting people to no longer continue to adhere to masking/social distancing for a little while longer, those circumstances may end up generating yet another surge of cases and possibly an even higher peak than the one we have come down from... due to the persistence of new variants that are more infectious, and more easily spread.
If you go to the top link above and hover over the data points at the site from earlier in the year, the previous plateau appears to have been averaging about 35,000 - 45,000 cases a day. But now we are plateauing at almost twice that level and our current plateau is at around the same level as the post- Memorial Day/post-July 4th peak. 
I know you mentioned the hospitalization rates but another measure back then running concurrent with that, were efforts to determine and reduce the rates of transmission so that you had "less than one person" infecting others, to get the virus out of general community spread.
The problem too is that the vaccine has been presented as a panacea and promoted by non-scientists as if it were a "cure". But what it would really be doing is reducing the amount of virus within a person if they contracted it (viral load), thus lessening the amount that could still be spread, while reducing (but not necessarily eliminating) the more detrimental symptoms.
