India Has Taught America Not To Underestimate COVID-19 - US Chief Pandemic Adviser

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th May, 2021) India has taught the United States not to underestimate the potency of a second wave of the COVID, top US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday.

"From India's outbreak, I think there are lessons we should apply to our response here in the US," Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases and an adviser to President Joe Biden's COVID Response Heam, told a hearing in Congress. "I think one of the important things is don't ever underestimate the situation."

The United States remains the most COVID-infected country with more than 32.7 million positive cases and over 582,000 deaths since the global outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020. But India has quickly caught up as number two in just over a month, having 23 million cases and almost 250,000 deaths.

Fauci said the United States learned two valuable lessons from countries like India and others afflicted with second waves of COVID: First, not to reopen too quickly from lockdowns; two,� when they do reopen, to have a robust public health system that could cope with such emergencies.

"The reason that India is in such dire straits now is that they had an original surge and made the incorrect assumption that they were finished with it," Fauci said. "They opened up prematurely and wind up having a surge right now that we're all very well aware of is extremely devastating. That's the first thing we learned. The second thing is preparedness with regard to public health which is a lesson to be learned for future pandemics."

A number of US states, especially those run by Republicans opposed to President Biden's Democratic Party such as Florida, Texas and Mississippi, have scrapped masking laws and other COVID restrictions in an effort to fully reopen their economies from lockdowns, citing the country's vaccination drive, which has immunized more than 30 percent of the population against the virus.

Fauci and officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain that facial covering and social distancing were still important in breaking the spread of the virus as the remaining two-thirds of Americans have not been fully vaccinated and could be prone to new COVID variants.