Opinion: Fauci warns of big mistake. Will Trump listen?

In his testimony before the US Senate on Tuesday, Fauci and his public health colleagues (including CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield) painted a dire, if at times confusing, picture of an America that reopens too soon. Opening prematurely, Fauci warned, creates “a real risk you will trigger an outbreak you will not be able to control.” If that happens, he said, “it will almost turn the clock back, rather than going forward.”

The White House doesn’t seem particularly committed to moving forward. Troublingly, the Trump administration shelved specific CDC reopening guidelines (White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx denied the report was buried, saying instead it was being edited and simplified).

All of this seemed to particularly aggravate a handful of blue state senators during the Senate testimony Tuesday. Chris Murphy, a Connectictut Democrat, repeatedly asked how his state was supposed to reopen in a few short days without clear and specific guidance.

Fauci’s recommendation that states “go by the guidelines that have been very well thought out and very well delineated” was well-taken, but a bit hard to reconcile with the fact that guidance has not been nearly as specific as it needs to be, and expert opinion has been repeatedly undermined by the Trump administration. The President, after all, is still lying about the number of tests available; months into this pandemic, there is still no comprehensive national testing, tracing and treatment program.

Safety, Fauci said, comes down to testing (and what we do after the testing). There is no question that whenever we reopen, however precise and careful we’ve been, there will be some uptick in cases. The goal isn’t zero new cases.

No one wants to be shut down forever, or frankly even a minute longer than we have to be. The economic effects are devastating. The health effects likely are, too — without full access to employment, preventative health care, exercise, fresh food, social engagement and the medical procedures that are technically nonessential but in the long-term likely life-extending, a great many people are going to get sick with diseases other than coronavirus, and a great many will die.

Which is why it’s so infuriating that President Trump seems to care more about getting the right ratings than getting the response right.

“I am very careful, and hopefully humble, in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease,” Fauci told the Senate. “And that’s why I am very careful in making broad predictions.”

Indeed, he said that he is an expert in public health, not economic matters, and so public health is what he speaks to. And he was clear: If we want to put public health first, we need to meet each checkpoint before moving onto the next, and we need to meet them all before reopening. Jumping ahead would be a tremendous mistake.

Now we just have to hope that the President of the United States and the most sycophantic governors will listen to the experts, believe the facts, and act accordingly — in other words, do the opposite of what they’ve done for their entire tenures.