Dr Fauci wants Americans to wear masks ‘at least’ 100 days in Joe Biden presidency

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s leading specialist in infectious diseases, suggested that Americans could wear “at least” masks for 100 days after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is commenting on a question about what the Biden government could do in the early days to tackle the spread of the new coronavirus.

Fauci told NPR on Thursday that the new government is also likely to make great efforts to accelerate the vaccination of the vaccine program.

“We want to get a million vaccinations a day, as the president-elect called,” Fauci said. “The idea of ​​everyone having at least 100 days – at least – to wear a mask. Everyone is uniform, so we do not have inequalities where some people follow the social measures and others do not.”

In December, President-elect Joe Biden said he planned to issue a permanent order requiring Americans to wear masks in federal buildings and transport them on interstates during the first 100 days of his rule.

“On the first day I am inaugurated, I will ask the public 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask – not forever, just 100 days. And I think we will see a significant reduction [of new cases]”Biden told CNN.

Fauci also told NPR that in the early stages of the Biden presidency we could see greater interaction and ‘cooperation’ between the federal government and the states instead of ‘being able to do their own thing’ in some respects.

His comments come as the U.S. reported more than 4,000 COVID-19 deaths on Thursday – a new daily record for the pandemic. The country has now recorded a total of more than 365,000 COVID deaths and more than 21.7 million confirmed infections.

In his NPR, Fauci said he believes this trend “unfortunately” is likely to continue in the coming weeks, with an increase in new cases, in part due to increased social interaction during the Christmas and New Year.

“After the next few weeks in January, it’s likely to be a reflection of the holiday season and the compositions that usually take place socially during that period,” Fauci said. “So we believe things will get worse when we come in January.”

“Hopefully we will be able to stop the acceleration if we really accelerate our social health measures during that period,” he said. “But it will really require people to concentrate very, very intensively on the kinds of public health measures that we talk about all the time. This is not the time to go back to this.”