Dr. Fauci Says We May Never Shake Hands Again
When the coronavirus pandemic is over, Dr. Anthony Fauci believes we should never shake hands ever again.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, a leading expert in the U.S. fight against COVID-19 who appears in the nightly briefings from the White House coronavirus task force, told the Wall Street Journal’s podcast on Tuesday that as strict lockdowns end, many normal habits and behaviors will have to change.
“It isn’t like a light switch on and off,” Fauci told the Journal podcast host Kate Linebaugh about the future, and what going back to normal could look like in the United States. “It’s a gradual pulling back on certain of the restrictions to try and get society a bit back to normal.”
“When you gradually come back, you don’t jump into it with both feet,” Fauci said. “You say, what are the things you can still do and still approach normal? One of them is absolute compulsive hand washing. The other one is you don’t ever shake anybody’s hands. That’s clear.”
Later, Fauci doubled down when Linebaugh later asked if we’ll ever get back to a pre-coronavirus normal. “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” he said. “Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease the incidents of influenza dramatically in this country.”
Beyond handshakes, Fauci said that cloth face masks might also be a necessity for the foreseeable future in situations where you can’t maintain six feet of separation from other people.
“You can still approach a degree of normality and under certain circumstances be wearing a mask,” he said. “People say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not normal you’re wearing a mask,’ but it’s trying to get back to some form of normality.”
Whether or not lockdown restrictions will actually end on April 30, the date of the White House extension, Fauci added, “If you’re even going to consider a relaxation of this stringent physical separation, you absolutely have to have in place the capability of doing rapid efficient identification, isolation and contact tracing.”
As the government works to get those systems into place, Fauci said, “We hope that by the end of this 30 day extension that we will start to see the light at the end of the tunnel where we can say we’re pretty confident that we can gradually start approaching some degree of normality.”
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