With restaurants back open, curfews pushed back, and temperature checks being less of a concern from coast to coast, we are hoping that the endpoint is near. Unfortunately, it may be a bit further off than we thought. In a May 9 interview with ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos asked Anthony Fauci, MD, the White House’s chief COVID adviser, to give some insight into what the U.S. might look like by this time next year.
Dr. Fauci said the U.S. will be “close to back to normal” by Mother’s Day 2021.
“I hope that next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now,” Fauci told Stephanopoulos. “I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can. And there are some conditions to that.”
In order to get to that point of normalcy, Fauci said the “overwhelming proportion of the population” needs to get vaccinated. “When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. There aren’t a lot of vulnerable people around,” he explained. “And where there are not a lot of vulnerable people around, you’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.” Thankfully, with the help of the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) thinks we will eventually “approach what we use to remember as normal before all of this tragedy happened.”
Fauci also relieved pregnant women that they can safely get vaccinated.
Keeping with the theme of Mother’s Day, Stephanopoulos asked Fauci to pregnant women who might feel apprehensive about COVID vaccines. “Well, if you look at the data, George, there doesn’t seem to be a problem at all,” Fauci said. He noted that there’s been “literally, tens and tens of thousands of women who are pregnant who’ve gotten vaccinated.” He also assured his listeners that “there are no red flags. Nothing that looks like there’s going to be any problem.”
On May 5, the World Health Organization suggested in a webinar that pregnant women get vaccinated when the benefits of the jab “outweigh the potential risks.” The WHO added, “It is not necessary to conduct pregnancy testing prior to vaccination; nor is there a need to delay or terminate the pregnancy because of vaccination.”
An Expert said that people have started returning to a “pre-pandemic normal.
Last month, emergency medicine physician Leana Wen, MD, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the U.S. is moving back to normal. “We’re seeing restrictions being lifted in so many parts of the country, we’re seeing travel at an all-time high. People are already going back to pre-pandemic normal,” Wen said. “We have a pretty narrow window of opportunity to make clear what the benefits of vaccinations are. We know that these vaccines are really effective at preventing severe disease.”
Another expert said that America will be “close to normal” by July 1, 2021.
On May 2, Ashish Jha, MD, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, gave a solid projection for when the U.S. will “feel close to normal” again. “If we keep vaccinating Americans, I think by July 1, 2021, you’re going to see much of America feel close to normal,” he told This Week co-anchor, Martha Raddatz. “Look, it won’t be 100 percent, [but] this can be pretty close to what life was like before the pandemic.”