- President Donald Trump claimed that COVID-19 would not be back in the fall, during the Wednesday coronavirus press briefing.
- NIAID director Anthony Fauci later said it’s almost certain the coronavirus will still be here by then.
- Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the outbreak would be more complicated to handle in the fall as it coincides with flu season.
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After President Donald Trump claimed that the new coronavirus may not come back in the fall — and if it does it “won’t be coming back in the form that it was” — during a press conference on Wednesday.
Shortly after, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci said we will see the coronavirus in the fall.
“If we have embers of corona coupled with the flu. It’s not going to be what we’ve gone through in any way, shape, or form,” Trump said. “It’s also possible it doesn’t come back at all.”
Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, later spoke and said the coronavirus will still be around in the fall: “We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that,” Fauci said.
According to CNBC, Trump made the remarks after stating that Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was misquoted when he said that the US could face a more complicated outbreak in the fall when flu season also reemerges.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield told The Washington Post.
“Next fall and winter, we’re going to have two viruses circulating and we’re going to have to distinguish between which is flu and which is the coronavirus,” he added.
But Trump tried to walk back Redfield’s comments on Wednesday: “He was talking about the flu and corona coming together at the same time, and corona could be just some little flare-ups that we’ll take care of.”
According to The New York Times, Redfield later told reporters that he wasn’t misquoted, but he did take to the lectern on Wednesday to discuss his comments.
“When I commented yesterday that there was a possibility of next fall and winter, it could be more difficult, more complicated when we had two respiratory illnesses circulating at the same time,” Redfield said. “I didn’t say that this was going to be worse. I said that this was going to be more difficult.”
Fauci added that how big the coronavirus outbreak is in the fall depends on mitigation efforts to limit the spread, but he agreed with Redfield’s assertion that it could be more complicated in the fall.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News that Redfield was trying to get Americans to get a flu shot “the mainstream media has been taking him out of context, as they so often do with Trump administration officials,” CBS reported.
McEnany claimed that what Redfield was trying to say was: “The flu comes back in the fall. Be smart, American people.”
