AMERICANS should avoid shaking hands “ever” again after the coronavirus pandemic begins to die down, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci. The top doctor of Donald Trump‘s coronavirus task force said on Tuesday that in an ideal world, Americans would avoid handshakes once the country begins to loosen lockdown restrictions. “When you gradually come back, you […]
AMERICANS should avoid shaking hands “ever” again after the coronavirus pandemic begins to die down, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The top doctor of Donald Trump‘s coronavirus task force said on Tuesday that in an ideal world, Americans would avoid handshakes once the country begins to loosen lockdown restrictions.
“When you gradually come back, you don’t jump into it with both feet,” Fauci said during an interview on a Wall Street Journal podcast.
“You say, what are the things you could still do and still approach normal? One of them is absolute compulsive hand-washing.
“The other is you don’t ever shake anybody’s hands.”
He added: “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.”
Avoiding handshakes would not only prevent the coronavirus, it would likely dramatically decrease the number of flu infections in the US, Fauci reasoned.
More than 14,000 people in the US have died from the coronavirus as over 430,000 have been infected around the country.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made a similar assertion this week in another interview with Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Americans should “just forget about shaking hands”, Fauci said, saying “we’ve got to break that custom.”
“Because as a matter of fact, that is really one of the major ways you can transmit a respiratory illness,” he added.
He said he hopes the country will approach “some degree of normality” by the end of April.
However, before the country eases up on social distancing rules, various other methods need to be in place such as widely available rapid testing, isolation, and contact tracing, according to Fauci.
Despite his dire prediction a few weeks ago that more than 200,000 American could die from the killer virus, he believes the number will be less than originally projected.
“Although one of the original models projected 100- to 200,000 deaths, as we’re getting more data and seeing the positive effect of mitigation, those numbers are going to be downgraded,” he said on a Fox News appearance Wednesday morning.
“I don’t know exactly what the numbers are going to be, but right now it looks like it’s going to be less than the original projection.”
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