Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the White House's coronavirus response, predicted Tuesday night that the United States will be able to reopen its schools in the fall thanks to the expected progress by then in disease mitigation measures for the coronavirus.
Fauci made the comments in response to a reporter during the daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.
"You know, it is unpredictable, but you can get a feel for it if we start talking about the things where the curve goes down," Fauci said. "How we respond and what kind of a rebound we see or don't see, I think is going to have a lot of influence probably more immediately on things like summer camps than it does in the fall," he continued
He continued: "I fully expect - though, I'm humble enough to know that I can't accurately predict - that by the time we get to the fall that we will have this under control, enough that it certainly will not be the way it is now where people are shutting schools."
The pandemic expert made clear, however, that the coronavirus isn't going to just go away. He said that he expects by the fall the U.S. will have enough herd immunity and have honed its disease mitigation protocols for the coronavirus enough that people will be able to return to public settings.
"My optimistic side tells me that we'll be able to renew to a certain extent, but it's going to be different. Remember now because this is not going to disappear," Fauci said. "So we're going to have to have in place the capability of doing the things that we talk about all the time on this stage, to identify, to isolate, to contact trace — number one. Number two, by that time, we'll have a better feel with the antibody test about what the actual penetrance of this infection was in society."