The availability of COVID-19 testing — especially rapid tests — will be a good guideline for when stay-at-home and social distancing restrictions can be eased, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force said Sunday.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it will be “weeks” before that’s the case in some of the already “hot spots” around the United States, like New York City and New Orleans.
"If you release the restrictions before you have a good eyeball on what's going on there, you're going to get in trouble,” Fauci warned. “So I'm not against releasing the restrictions. I'm actually for it, in an appropriate place. But I don't recommend it unless we have the tools in place in real time to do [testing].”
“When we get those tests out that you can do right away, rapid point of care and do it, then I think we'll be closer,” he said of an end to restrictions. “To put a time on it, … I don't know. It's going to be a matter of weeks. It's not going to be tomorrow and it's certainly not going to be next week.”
Fauci also repeated his assertion that the virus “determines the timeline” of restrictions.
“When we start to see a daily number of cases instead of increasing and escalating, they start to flatten out, turn the corner, and then start coming down, when we see that, then you can start doing the modification of the intensity of your mitigation,” he said.
“As I've said before, it's true, the virus itself determines that timetable. You can try and influence that timetable by mitigating against the virus. But ultimately it's what the virus does.”
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