Dr Anthony Fauci offered a broad assessment of where the United States stands in the midst of the fight against the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic, while urging Americans to stay the course with the social distancing measures much of the nation has been practicing to slow the spread of the virus.

There have been more than 1.6 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide The virus has killed more than 100,000.

In the United States, 503,177 cases have been reported, including 18,761, according to the most recent figures.

“We’re starting to see the leveling off and the coming down that [White House coronavirus response coordinator] Dr. [Deborah] Birx had mentioned. But it’s important to remember that this is not the time to feel that since we have made such important advance in the sense of success of the mitigation that we need to be pulling back at all,” said Dr Fauci, a member of the federal coronavirus task force and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “I was actually heartened by the fact that we’ve been talking about New York, New Jersey, New Orleans, and other areas where they have really big spikes, but there’s other parts of the country, middle parts of the country where they are concerned to make sure they don’t get those spikes.

“And I want to salute the governors of states throughout the entire United States, but particularly in the central part of the country,” he added. “The governors see us in these press conferences and I’ve had calls over the last several days from several of the governors, from Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Utah, just about an hour and a half ago. I spoke with the governors of Arkansas and Wyoming who are really committed to make sure that they don’t get into the situation where they’re going to have spikes in their state, and they’re doing the kinds of things they don’t get recognized because people don’t talk about them much but we have a big country. We have 50 states, and it’s not only the big cities. So if we’re going to pull out of this, we’re going to pull out of it in the big cities, and we’re going to pull out in those areas that aren’t as densely populated. And I just want to give a shout-out to them. They’re doing an extraordinary job. I was really, I wouldn’t say surprised because I expect it of this country, but to hear what they’re doing and the commitment that they’re putting in to making sure that we don’t have the kinds of situations that we’ve experienced unfortunately in other areas, this is very important.

“I just want to close by one other thing. Something I mentioned yesterday and the day before, that there are a lot of candidate interventions that are going into clinical trials,” Dr Fauci added. “For those of you who are interested, and I recommend you go to clinicaltrials.gov and you’ll see the design of the clinical trial and you’ll see that many of them are the randomized controlled trials that are really, the gold standard of how you find out whether something really is safe and effective, and as the weeks and months, it will probably be months, some time in the summer, we’ll start to see, which are working and which are not and to focus on those that we’re developing.”

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