Dr. Anthony Fauci said it’s “tough to predict” when fully vaccinated people can spend time indoors without masks on.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN over the weekend that it might take some time to figure out when people can mingle indoors without masks.
- “It’s always tough to predict that,” he told CNN. “I think if we continue to go down in the cases that we’re seeing right now and more and more people get vaccinated, as the dynamics of the outbreak, namely the amount of virus circling the community goes down, I hope we’ll be able to pull back on some of those restrictions to get closer to what we really feel is normal in the community.”
- “I hope that’s soon but I can’t give a prediction on that date,” he added.
Fauci acknowledged that coronavirus cases are dipping as we head toward the winter. Officials and experts said that more vaccinations can stop the coronavirus from spreading far this winter, as I wrote for the Deseret News. The delta variant surge may be tapering out, but that doesn’t mean the virus won’t stop completely.
Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Stanford, told The New York Times that improved vaccination and natural immunity can bring an end to the pandemic, or at least stop us from seeing COVID-19 cases similar to what we saw in 2020.
- “Most of us don’t think we’re going to see the terrible surge we saw last winter,” she said. “That was horrific. I hope we never have to live through something like that again.”