Fauci Predicts Likely COVID Surge Come Fall Amid ‘Terribly Tragic’ 1M Deaths

As the U.S. hit 1 million lives lost to COVID-19, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has warned Americans that another possible virus surge is on the horizon.

Fauci made the comments on Thursday in an interview with PBS, saying, “There is a threat and a likelihood that we'll see a surge as we get into the fall and the winter. So we've got to be prepared.”

He added, "Even though, right at this moment, we're not in the so-called fulminant phase of the outbreak, we are still in the middle of the pandemic.”

Fauci told PBS that many of the 1 million lives lost to COVID-19 were avoidable “if people had been vaccinated.” He estimated that a quarter or 250,000 lives could have been saved through vaccines and booster shots.

Even Fauci is surprised at the staggering 1 million death count that COVID brought, telling PBS that “this is terribly tragic.”

In the early days of the pandemic, Fauci had estimated that death totals could reach 200,000, and he said that he was “criticized by many people as being too pessimistic. And look at that. We have five times the higher level that I said, and we're still not through this.”

But Fauci said to avoid COVID deaths from escalating higher, it is going to require more resources such as the continuation of a vaccination program and better drugs that prevent hospitalization, severe disease, and death.

“This pandemic is not over,” Fauci told PBS. “And if we bring down our guard and not do the things we need to do, forget about getting people vaccinated, forget about getting people boosted, we can get ourselves into the same trouble we were several months ago.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 220.4 million Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, accounting for 66.4% of the eligible population, with 46.3% receiving their first booster shot.