Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said the younger people who are testing positive for Covid-19 in this surge of the outbreak are very important to stopping it.
“We’ve got to convince them that just because they get infected and the likelihood that they’re not going to get seriously ill, doesn’t mean that their infection is not a very important part of the propagation of the outbreak,” Fauci said on Monday.
Speaking during a webinar with Stanford School of Medicine, he said that young people need to think of not only their personal responsibilities, but their societal responsibilities.
“Although you may not get sick, almost certainly you’re going to infect somebody else, who almost certainly infects somebody else and then you will get a vulnerable person who will be sick, who will go to the hospital, who might die,” said Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force.
“The best way to reopen the country and to get back to normal is to be very prudent in protecting yourself from getting infected,” he said. “That’s a difficult message when people don’t take something seriously, but we’ve got to hammer that home.”