What we hope to get it at is such a low level that even though it isn't completely eliminated, it doesn't have a major impact on public health or on the way we run our lives, so if we get more people vaccinated globally and more people vaccinated now, hopefully within a reasonable period of time, we will get to that point where it might occasionally be up and down in the background, but it won't dominate us the way it's doing right now.

Anthony Fauci

I disagree that her current role has tainted her reputation.

You're going to get back to normal, and you'll be able to freely have fun, go to the bars, go with the crowds, but not now, now's not the time to do that.

I've never seen an infection with this broad range of manifestations.

Dr. Ferrer said.Spike in cases was 'inevitable.

The problem is, since we started off our baseline so high, as we tried to open up, you saw that there was a wide variation in how that was done.

I think we can't deny that fact, if you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died, that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don't even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of, the possibility of... approaching that in seriousness.

As of today, on the 17th of February, the risk is really relatively low. But we, the public health officials, have to take this seriously enough to be prepared for it changing and there being a pandemic.

One of the things we want to emphasize and have been emphasizing is to take a look at where you are in the area of the so-called opening America again. Are you at the gateway phase one, phase two, phase three ? the CDC has guidelines about the opening of schools at various stages of those checkpoints. The basic fundamental goal would be as soon as you possibly can to get the children back to school and to use the public health as a tool to help get children back to school.

Rather than think in terms of reverting back down to a complete shutdown, I would think we need to get the states pausing in their opening process.

People lined up two and three deep at a bar in an indoor place with air conditioners circulating... people don't have their masks on, and that's a real vulnerable area, are the bars.

I would hope we don't have to resort to shut down, i think that would be something that is obviously an extreme. I think it would not be viewed very, very favorably... So rather than think in terms of reverting back down to a complete shutdown, I would think we need to get the states pausing in their opening process.

From experience historically... when you don't have unanimity in an approach to something, you're not as effective in how you handle it.

We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this, rather than looking at the public health effort versus economic opening as if they were opposing forces... we should use the public health effort as a vehicle and a pathway to get to safe reopening.

What we're seeing is exponential growth. It went from an average of about 20,000 to 40,000 and 50,000. That's doubling.

So we've got to make sure that we don't create this binary type thing of' it's us against them,' it's not. We're all in it together.

That is being discussed really very actively. We were discussing it actively today in the task force and I can assure you, it's going to be on the agenda tomorrow, given the fact that we know that asymptomatic people are clearly transmitting infection, it just makes commonsense that it's not a bad idea to do that.

How do David Pugh do contact tracing when someone doesn't have any symptoms ? the standard, classic paradigm of identification, isolation, contact tracing doesn't work no matter how good you are because you don't know who you're tracing.

The dots are not connected because a lot of it is done by phone, fifty percent of the people because you're coming from an authority, don't even want to talk to you.

Bars : really not good, really not good, congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really have got to stop that.

In the United States, even in the most strict lockdowns, only about 50 % of the country locked down -- that allowed for the perpetuation of the outbreak, which we never did get under very good control.