US President Donald Trump has claimed that the worst of the pandemic crisis is past but Fauci warned that it had only plateaued at an extremely high level of 20,000 cases per day and was now rising again to spread at new record levels.
"There are so many things that are dangerous and bad about this virus. Don't let yourself get taken into false complacency", Fauci said in a podcast with Alabama Senator Doug Jones on Tuesday. "We are facing a serious problem now. We have peaked at a high level and stayed at 20,000 cases a day for months. ...We now have a resurgence: We have gone up as high as 57,000 cases [per day nationwide]".
President Trump previously said that COVID-19 mortality rate in the US has decreased tenfold since the peak in spring and that the country has the lowest death rate in the world, blaming the "fake news" for not reporting the death rate relative to the number of infections.
According to the Johns Hopkins University count, the US has registered over 2.9 million coronavirus cases, and at least 131,268 fatalities from the disease. Several states, including Texas, California, Florida and Arizona, have witnessed a surge in the number of coronavirus infections.