Fauci's Latest Description of US' COVID Status: 'Really Not Good'

Anthony Fauci didn't exactly have uplifting things to say about the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the US during an online chat hosted by the National Institutes of Health on Monday. The reason the country is currently seeing "record-breaking" numbers of cases is because states and cities started reopening too quickly, he explained, per the Hill. "We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this," he said. "It was a surge or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline ... that really never got down to where we wanted to go." He described the current situation as "really not good," per CNN.

And while White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed on Monday that "the world is looking at us as a leader in COVID-19," citing the US' lower mortality rate than Europe, Fauci said Europe is actually in a better place than the US. "If you look at the graphs from Europe, Europe, the European Union as an entity, it went up and then came down to baseline. Now they're having little blips, as you might expect, as they try to reopen,” he said. “We went up, never came down to baseline, and now we're surging back up, so it's a serious situation that we have to address immediately." He warned, "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." (More coronavirus stories.)