Dr. Fauci Just Predicted When This Will Finally Be Over

There's a "light at the end of the tunnel," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The vaccines are here and cases are dropping. However this is no time to let your guard down, he says: New variants of COVID-19 are more transmissible, and possibly more fatal. Fauci appeared on CNN's State of the Union this morning to discuss how to stay safe, and when this will all finally be over. Read on for his answer—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had Coronavirus. 

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Well, first that depends on what "normal" means. "It's important because if normality means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us—I mean, I can't predict that," said Fauci. "I mean, obviously I think we're going to have a significant degree of normality beyond what the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year that as we get into the fall and the winter, by end of the year, I agree with the president completely that we will be approaching a degree of normality. It may or may not be precisely the way it was in November of 2019, but it will be much, much better than what we're doing."

Why would we need to wear masks a full year from now? "Because it depends on the low, on the level of dynamics of virus that's in the community," said Fauci. "If you see the level coming down really, really very low, I want it to keep going down to a baseline that's so low that there's virtually no threat or not know it'll never be zero, but a minimal threat that you will be exposed to someone who is infected. So if you combine getting most of the people in the country vaccinated with getting the level of virus in the community very, very low, then I believe you're going to be able to say, you know, for the most part, we don't necessarily have to wear a mask. But if we have a level of virus that is at that level, that it was months and months ago, like 20,000 per day is a heck of a lot better than what it's been, but that's still very high level of virus in the community. I want to see it go way down when it goes way down and the overwhelming majority of the people in the population of vaccinated, then I would feel comfortable in saying, you know, we need to pull back on the masks we don't need to have."

"I'm saying we don't know," said Dr. Fauci about how long we'd have to wear masks. "We don't know. The president said it very, very well at the very end of this press conference, when he was in Michigan at the Pfizer plant, he said, you know, you asked me to make projections. These are just projections that are estimates. And a lot of things can happen to modify that. And that's the reason why we've got to be careful because you have variants that you need to deal with. There were so many other things that would make a projection that I give you today on this Sunday, wind up not being the case six months from now."

Of the nearly half a million COVID deaths in America, Fauci said: "It's terrible. It's really horrible. It's something that is historic. It's nothing like we've ever been through in the last hundred and two years since the 1918 influenza pandemic. People decades from now are going to be talking about this as it as a historic milestone—in the history of this country, to have these many people to have died from a respiratory-borne infection, it really is a terrible situation that we've been through and that we're still going through. And that's the reason why we keep insisting to continue with the public health measures, because we don't want this to get much worse than it already is."

RELATED: 7 Tips You Must Follow to Avoid COVID, Say Doctors

Follow Fauci's fundamentals and help end this surge, no matter where you live—wear a face mask that fits snugly and is double layered, don't travel, social distance, avoid large crowds, don't go indoors with people you're not sheltering with (especially in bars), practice good hand hygiene, get vaccinated when it becomes available to you, and to protect your life and the lives of others, don't visit any of these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID.