Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said this week he will not be spending Christmas with his three children and told Americans they should do the same.
“I’m going to be with my wife — period,” Fauci told The Washington Post. “The Christmas holiday is a special holiday for us because Christmas Eve is my birthday. And Christmas Day is Christmas Day. And [my daughters] are not going to come home.”
“That’s painful,” he went on to say. “We don’t like that. But that’s just one of the things you’re going to have to accept as we go through this unprecedented challenging time.”
Fauci said the U.S. has “a big problem” with COVID-19, explaining, “Look at the numbers — the numbers are really quite dramatic.”
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told Americans they need to “stay at home as much as you can” and to “keep your interactions to the extent possible to members of the same household.”
He added it’s “likely” the U.S. will “be back to normal by next Christmas.”
According to data from The COVID Tracking Project, the U.S. is seeing more than 3,000 coronavirus-related deaths each day and more than 230,000 new cases each day.
Fauci said the U.S. is being negatively impacted by the “independent spirit” of Americans who are “not wanting to comply with public health measures.”
“There are people in various parts of the country who still believe that [COVID-19] is a hoax, that it’s face — even when, in their own state, the hospitals have been overrun with patients in the hospital beds and in the intensive care unit,” he told the Post. “That’s very unusual to see a situation like that, but that is what is going on in this country.”