Infectious disease expert American doctor Anthony Fauci admitted in a Washington Post interview published Friday that the United States should change its approach to stem the Covid-19 pandemic, which is in the midst of a resurgence in a large part of the country.
“There is something wrong,” said the director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases, and a member of the White House crisis cell on the coronavirus. “We can make as many tables as we want, it will always remain that it does not work.”
The United States is doing more and more tests (more than 640,000 in one day reported Thursday, according to the Covid Tracking Project) but the number of confirmed cases has been increasing at an even higher rate in recent weeks. California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, highly populated states, are at the heart of this rebound.
“We need to find the penetration of infections in our society,” said Anthony Fauci. “The only way to do this is to cast a large net.”
One idea envisaged is to launch group screenings, according to him: the samples of a group of people would be mixed and tested in one go, which would save resources for groups without contaminated individuals. In the event of a positive result, each member of the group would be tested individually.
Between 5 and 8% of Americans have been infected since the start of the pandemic, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), which leaves between 92 and 95% of the population still likely to be infected.
However in many States, the deconfinement was done without the adoption by the populations of the barrier measures. The use of the mask, for example, is rare in the South and in the West, but more and more jurisdictions are now considering making it compulsory in an attempt to stem contagions.
For the first time since the end of April, the presidential crisis cell on the virus will give a press conference Friday at the White House, at 4.30 p.m.
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