Dr. Anthony Fauci is weighing in on India’s record-breaking Covid-19 surge, but some of his advice sounds much like the early 2020 prescription that failed to prevent the US from posting the world’s highest virus death toll.
“You can shut down temporarily to put an end to the cycle of transmission,” Washington’s coronavirus guru said on Friday in an interview with the Indian Express. “So one of the things to be considered is to temporarily shut down. Literally, lock down so that you wind up having less spread.”
No one likes to lock down the country. Well, that’s a problem when you do it for six months. But if you do it just for a few weeks, you could have a significant impact on the dynamics of the outbreak.
That advice from Fauci, currently chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, sounds eerily familiar to the counsel that he offered to then-president Donald Trump, as the White House’s Covid-19 czar, in March 2020. That’s when Trump announced his administration’s campaign of “15 days to slow the spread,” urging Americans to stay home for just about two weeks to contain the coronavirus outbreak.
The idea was that a brief lockdown would dramatically change the trajectory of Covid-19 infections and help squash the pandemic’s spread – much like the advice Fauci is giving to India now. “With several weeks of focused action, we can turn the tide and turn it quickly,” Trump said optimistically back then.
At the time, the US had reported just about 4,000 Covid-19 cases. A year later, Trump was out of office, nearly 30 million Americans had contracted Covid-19, and 535,000 people had reportedly died from the virus in the US.
