They've got to have the capability of doing the testing to begin with, they've got to have the capability of doing surveillance testing as you get into the school year, and they have to have a plan of how they handle the inevitability of some students who are going to wind up getting affected.

Anthony Fauci

Things are going to be very, very different.

We felt that if we prematurely pulled back, we would only form an acceleration or a rebound of something which would have put you behind where you were before, and that's the reason why we argued strongly with the President, that Anthony Fauci not withdraw those guidelines after 15 days, but that he extend them. And he did listen.

The idea that we may have these many cases played a role in our decision in trying to make sure that we don't do something prematurely and pull back when we should be pushing.

Anthony Fauci looked at them, Anthony Fauci understood them and Anthony Fauci just shook Anthony Fauci head and said,' I guess Doctors Birx and Fauci got to do it,'.

But I don't want to be held to that.

After discussions with the president, we made it clear, and he agreed, that it would be much better to do what's called a strong advisory.

Dr. Debbie Birx and I went in together in the Oval Office and leaned over the desk and said, 'Here are the data. Take a look,' he looked at them and he just shook his head and said, 'I guess we got to do it.'.

From a public health standpoint, we felt strongly that it would have been the wrong decision to pull back.

We feel the mitigation we are doing right now is having an effect, the decision to extend this mitigation process until the end of April is a wise and prudent decision.

I'm not against releasing the restrictions -- I'm actually for it in an appropriate place, but I don't recommend it unless we have the tools in place, in real time.

A model is as good as the assumptions you put into the model, and very often, many of these assumptionsare based on a complexity of issues that arent necessarily the same... from one country to another.

Vice President Mike Pence's listening to us when we say we really got to reevaluate it, in real time, and any decision we make has to be based on the data.

Donald Trump's listening to us when we say we really got to reevaluate it, in real time, and any decision we make has to be based on the data.

What we are starting to see is that there are some people who are younger, people your age - young, healthy, vigorous - who don't have any underlying conditions who are getting seriously ill, it's still a very, very small minority, but it doesn't mean that young people like yourself should say, 'I'm completely exempt from any risk of getting seriously ill,'.

You need to protect yourself because you are not completely exempt from serious illness, and you can become the vector, or the carrier of infection, where you get infected, you feel well and then you inadvertently and innocently pass it on to your grandfather, your grandmother or an uncle who is on chemotherapy for cancer.

We hope we get a respite as we get into April, May and June.

You may see in a relatively shorter period of Prime Time, when you're seeing the inkling of the flattening and coming down, but you know, you can't make an arbitrary decision until you see what you're dealing with. You need the data.

You've got to be realistic.

Obviously, no one is going to want to tone down things when you see things going on like in New York City.

No one is going to want to tone down things when you see what's going on in a place like New York City.