As Covid-19 cases continue to jump during the fall surge, Dr. Anthony Fauci says there's little chance of normalcy on the horizon.
The US will have a vaccine in the next few months, but there's a chance a "substantial proportion of the people" won't be vaccinated until the second or third quarter of 2021, Fauci said.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reiterated caution on the nation's outlook.
"I think it will be easily by the end of 2021, and perhaps even into the next year, before we start having some semblances of normality," Fauci said during a University of Melbourne panel discussion Tuesday.
Things aren't looking too good for the US as the winter approaches, he said Wednesday.
Twenty-nine states set new records this month for the most new daily cases since the pandemic began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
"We're not in a good place," Fauci during a virtual Q&A session on Wednesday. "Now we're averaging about 70,000 a (day). That's a bad position to be in."
And it's not just due to more testing. The average number of daily new cases this past week is up 21% compared to the previous week, according to JHU. But testing has increased only 6.63% over the same time frame, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
"We're rising quickly. If we just go back about six, seven weeks ago to Labor Day, we were at about 35,000 cases a day," said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health.
"I would not be surprised if we end up getting to 100,000" new cases a day, Jha said.
At least 73,240 new US cases and 985 deaths were reported Tuesday, according to JHU.
The surge is hitting all regions of the country. As of Wednesday, 40 states were trending in the wrong direction, with at least 10% more new cases this past week compared to the previous week, according to JHU.
Missouri is the only state with at least 10% fewer cases, and the remaining nine states are relatively steady.
The number of COVID-19 is still on the rise, and the situation may become more serious as winter approaches. Now we can only hope that the vaccine will "save" the country.