CLEVELAND — In an interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed the current state of COVID-19 in the United States.
"It’s a mixed bag in this country," the renowned medical expert said. "Some areas are doing well, but some, really, we’ve got to really pay attention to."
Fauci says the surges some states are seeing are due to many young people not taking the virus seriously and states opening back up too quickly.
"When you look at what the guidelines were for opening, you know the checkpoints that you have to get past before you went to the next phase," he said. "Some of them went too quickly and officially jumped over them."
University Hospitals infectious disease specialist Dr. Amy Edwards agrees, and says Ohio falls into the category of opening prematurely.
"As much as I approved overall of what Gov. DeWine did, he did rush a few steps," she told 3News. "If you look at the CDC’s guidance for reopening, one of the very first criteria was 14 days of decreasing cases, which we never really and truly hit. We kept having these little times where we would bump a little bit. Clearly, we didn’t follow the CDC’s guidance, and we’re paying for it."
CORONAVIRUS IN OHIO: Up-to-date case numbers & trends
So how do we combat the surge? Fauci says instead of completely shutting back down he’s in favor of more of a reset, where states go back to guidelines and stages of the reopening plan. Edwards says she’d like to see a rollback to previous phases of the opening in Ohio, but says it would only be effective if everyone participated.
"If you look at the numbers, we’re about a month or so behind Florida," she said. "I think if we really took a reset very seriously, I think we could avoid the worst of it. That means everybody has to wear their masks, that means everybody has to do what they’re told and that means everybody has to socially distance. I’d like to believe Ohioans would do that and can do that, I just haven’t seen it yet."
MASK MANDATES: These businesses are requiring face coverings