Source: https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/want-defeat-covid-19-you-can-do-your-part-when-you-maskup
The U.S. remains “right in the middle of the first wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic, with national case counts hovering around 50,000–60,000 per day and more than 1,000 people dying daily, Anthony S. Fauci, MD, explained during a JAMA Network™ livestreamed video interview.
“We’ve got to get those numbers down,” stressed Dr. Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “If we don’t get them down, we’re going to have a really bad situation in the fall … as you get indoors and you get the complications of influenza season.”
The goal is to get the daily nationwide caseload below 10,000 before September. In the interview with JAMA Editor-in-Chief Howard Bauchner, MD, Dr. Fauci detailed these five keys physicians should be stressing with patients to protect themselves, their families and their communities from the deadly, contagious respiratory illness.
Wear a mask consistently and correctly
“We need, as a nation, to show a degree of consistency of everybody” following public-health recommendations on wearing masks or other face coverings, said Dr. Fauci.
“What we need is to get the message across that we are all in this together. And it’s important because one of the purposes of the masks is that if you may be inadvertently walking around not knowing you’re infected—to protect others from getting infected,” Dr. Fauci said. “We have to keep hammering home with that message.”
Dr. Fauci said he’s “very pleased to see the president is wearing masks more often now,” and added that Vice President Mike Pence “wears masks when he goes out and is in situations where masks are needed.”
The nation “needs more of that consistency,” he said. The goal, Dr. Fauci added later in the interview, should be “universal wearing of masks.”
Learn from AMA President Susan R. Bailey, MD, about why it’s time to #MaskUp.
