Although he didn’t want to make any hard-and-fast promises, the leading US immunologist Dr Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that he believes schools will be able to resume in the United States in the fall.

Schools, along with much of everything else is shut down in most of the United States as part of the extreme measures to try to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19 pandemic.

There have been more than 1.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide. The virus has killed more than 82,000.

In the United States, there have been 374,329 cases reported, including 12,064 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“I fully expect, though I’m humble enough to know that I can’t accurately predict, that by the time we get to the fall, that we will have this under control enough that it certainly will not be the way it is now, where people are shutting schools,” said Dr Fauci, a member of the federal coronavirus task force and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “My optimistic side tells me that we will be able to renew, to a certain extent, but it will be different.

“Remember now, because this is not going to disappear, so we will have to have in place the capability of doing the things that we talk about all the time on this stage, to identify, to isolate, to contact trace, Number One. Number Two, by that time we will have a better feel with the antibody test about what the actual penetrance of this infection was in society,” he added. “How many people have actually been infected? Who is protected? If you have antibodies, it’s very likely that you’re protected. Who is vulnerable? Do you treat vulnerables different than you treat people who are protected?

“All of these things will go into the decision of just how much back to the original way we’d like it to be in the fall,” Dr Fauci said. “The bottom line is, no absolute prediction, but I think we will be in good shape.”

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