Top US Doctor Sees COVID-19 Crisis Easing After Devastating Death Toll This Week

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Rising fatalities from the COVID-19 pandemic loom for the remainder of the week, even as reports on hospital and intensive care unit admissions offer glimmers of hope that social distancing and other mitigation efforts are beginning to slow the viral contagion, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci told Fox News.

"It’s very sobering to see the increase in deaths and we predicted over the weekend that this would really be a bad week and it is", National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci said in an interview.

"It’s going to be a bad week for deaths, but driving that and ahead of that is the fact that we’re going to start to see the beginning of a turnaround, so we need to keep pushing on the mitigation strategy because there’s no doubt that that’s having a positive impact on the dynamics of the outbreak", he added.

More than 1,800 people died in the 24-hour period on Tuesday, the highest single day so far, according to official and media reports.

But Fauci cited the drop in hospital admissions, new cases and patients requiring ventilators - reported by the state of New York in recent days - as evidence social distancing and other mitigation are beginning to slow the pandemic.

Death rates typically lag the number of new cases by a "couple of weeks", meaning that as the nation moves beyond this week, "we should start to see the beginnings of a turnaround", Fauci said.

About 4,000 COVID-19 patients died so far in New York, the epicentre of the US outbreak, in an epidemic that has sickened about 400,000 people throughout the United States.