Today, infectious disease expert and White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci will testify before the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where he plans to warn senators of the risk of trying to force things back to normal too soon. He’s one of four doctors scheduled to testify today, beginning at 10AM EDT, and you can watch live above.
Speaking to Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times over email last night, Fauci explained the main point he hopes to impress upon lawmakers this morning:
The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.
It will be interesting to see what Fauci has to say on his own, separate from Donald Trump’s coronavirus briefings that have recently halted. Of course, I’m sure we’ll still get Trump’s live commentary via Twitter, if this goes anything like any other congressional hearing the contents of which he’ll almost certainly not like.
Meanwhile, over in reality, the rest of us have very real concerns about how the easing of restrictions will be—or is being, depending on where you live—handled, considering we’ve heard that the White House rejected CDC guidelines for doing so, and that even some areas of the country that are lifting restrictions already still haven’t met White House-approved benchmarks for doing so.
None of us are enjoying this, and we’re all looking forward to going about our lives again, but Fauci’s warning that trying to do so too soon could actually put that goal farther away—and, of course, cause more deaths—is exactly what we don’t want to happen.
You can also watch on Facebook (if you want to see a bunch of angry-face emoji flying by), or through the Senate’s own livestream.
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