In fact, during a Tuesday interview with CNN, he revealed that things are going to get worse before they are going to get better and that the pandemic has "just gotten...out of control in many respects".
"We very well might see a post-seasonal - in the sense of Christmas, New Years - surge", USA top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told CNN Sunday morning. Despite warnings about traveling and getting together with people outside a household, Fauci feared another surge on top of the current surge following the Christmas holiday. Besides exposing themselves at airports, travelers usually mix households when they arrive at their destinations, he said. Though Fauci, along with several other United States health leaders, did initially advise people not to wear masks, his guidance evolved along with the scientific community's understanding of the coronavirus. "What we are doing now is certainly saving lives - no doubt about that - but when you get to the point where you can essentially say anybody and everybody who wants to be vaccinated can be vaccinated, that's when you really turn around the dynamics of the outbreak".
"As we get into the next few weeks", he said, "it might actually get worse".
Joe Biden asked Fauci to join his administration as chief medical adviser, a role Fauci said he immediately accepted.
"December is already the deadliest month since the beginning of the pandemic in the United States", said a weekly report of The COVID Tracking Project.
As of Sunday morning, at least 19 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 332,000 people have died, according to a New York Times database.
Global travel also remains a concern as federal regulators in the United States ordered on Friday that all air travelers from Britain must test negative for COVID-19 no more than 72 hours before their flight, following the discovery of a new strain of the virus in the country.
Sen. Marco Rubio's attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci are thinly transparent appeals to the "most deranged" Republican voters, according to one conservative writer.
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Fauci said that the figures Bash mentioned were correct - a baseline of 200,000 new COVID-19 cases, about 2,000 deaths per day, and hospitalisations exceeding 120,000.
