A clip from one year ago — captured on March 11, 2020 — is making its way through the internet as it shows Dr. Anthony Fauci warning America about what’s to come from the coronavirus pandemic.
The clip, which you can see below, is from a congressional hearing between Fauci and the House Oversight Committee.
On March 11, 2020, Fauci testified before Congress about the coronavirus outbreak, according to Business Insider. It was in that meeting that Fauci gave a stark warning about what was to come.
- Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney asked Fauci: “Is the worst yet to come, Dr. Fauci?”
- Dr. Fauci responded: “Yes, it is.”
Fauci then added:
“Whenever you have an outbreak that you can start seeing community spread, which means by definition that you don’t know what the index case is and the way you can approach it is by contact tracing, when you have enough of that, then it becomes a situation where you’re not going to be able to effectively and efficiently contain it.”
“Whenever you look at the history of outbreaks, what you see now in an uncontained way, and although we are containing it in some respects, we keep getting people coming in from the country that are travel-related. We’ve seen that in many of the states that are now involved, and then when you get community spread, it makes the challenge much greater. So I can say we will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now. How much worse we’ll get will depend on our ability to do two things, to contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside, and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. Bottom line, it’s going to get worse.”
Fauci didn’t see the numbers coming.
In March 2020, Fauci said COVID-19 could kill between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans and infect millions, according to NPR. Even though he warned the U.S. of what was to come, the United States death toll more than doubled what Fauci originally predicted, according to NBC News.
- The novel coronavirus has killed over 2,462,000 people throughout the world, too.
He recently told the “Today” show that the 500,000 number “would have shocked me completely.”