As President Donald Trump plans to roll out guidelines for how to reopen the country today, Dr. Anthony Fauci discusses what that will entail and hinted a vaccine may be ready sooner than anticipated.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director told CBS Evening News on Wednesday what the new normal for Americans will be when businesses begin to open up again and social restrictions are eased.
In order to successfully reopen the economy, Fauci said guidelines must be in place to prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus.
"The success or failure of that rolling re-entry program as I call it would be the capability of being able to test, identify, isolate, get someone who is infected out of circulation — and do a degree of contact tracing," Dr. Fauci told CBS. "The absolute thing that you would need is to be able to respond and contain whatever rebound you get so that you don't wind up in a situation where you have another escalation.”
But Fauci said even with safeguards in place, experiences like going out to restaurants and bars will be different.
"I absolutely would not be surprised if we did see in certain places that someone would take one of those very quick temperature checks — put in front of your forehead and wind up determining if you're febrile or not — and keeping you out of whatever location you want to go into," he said. "Also more physical separation — I think that's feasible."
Fauci didn’t provide a timeline for when larger events could return like sports and concerts. But he did hint that a vaccine could come faster than expected.
Public health officials previously suggested a vaccine was more than a year away, but Fauci said it could be ready sooner as several clinical trials are about to begin.
"It is possible to shave a couple of months off that,” he said of the 12-18 month estimate. “But you know you don't want to over-promise, we'll just have to see how it goes.”
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