The United States is "seeing hotspots literally throughout the entire country," with a countrywide average of 70,000 COVID-19 cases per day, NIAID director Anthony Fauci told the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's annual forum Friday.
Driving the news: The U.S. hit another grim milestone on Friday, with the total number of confirmed coronavirus cases surpassing 9 million as new infections surge across the country, per data from Johns Hopkins University.
- The country on Thursday set a new single-day record, reporting more than 88,450 cases of COVID-19, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project.
What he's saying: Fauci noted that, "When we first got hit badly, it was dominated predominantly by what was going on in the New York metropolitan area, where in the spring about 40% of the cases as the hospitalizations and the deaths were there."
- But, "[o]ther areas of the country began to get hot as it were in the standpoint of cases. So our baseline, unlike Europe — which when they got hit badly, they came down to a very low baseline — our baseline was about 20,000 new cases a day."
The infectious disease expert added that the U.S. is still facing its "original wave" of the pandemic, with an "unacceptable" number of new cases, per CNBC.
- “When I hear people talk about second and third waves, it really is the original wave that just resurges up, comes down a little, and resurges up again,” Fauci told SiriusXM’s “Doctor Radio Reports” in an interview that aired on Friday.
- “We never got out of the real wave. We kind of went up and down within a wave."
- The top infectious disease expert also said that the U.S. is reporting an “extremely high and quite unacceptable” daily number of COVID-19 cases as it prepares to head into the colder winter months.
- "That’s something that you wish you did not have as you enter into the colder months because out of necessity, a lot more things are going to have to be done indoors because of the weather,” Fauci said.
Go deeper: Fauci says U.S. may not return to normal until 2022
