Americans could be wearing masks into 2022, Dr Fauci warns

‘I can’t predict that,’ Fauci says when asked when things will go back to normal

Americans could still be wearing masks through the rest of the year and into 2022 even as the US begins returning to a state of pre-Covid normalcy in other ways, Dr Anthony Fauci has said.

“It is possible that that’s the case,” Dr Fauci said on Sunday in an interview with CNN when asked if mask use would continue into next year.

“When it goes way down and the overwhelming majority of the people in the population are vaccinated, then I would feel comfortable in saying, you know, ‘We need to pull back on the masks,’” he said.

Dr Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health, has become a staple on the Sunday news shows as the face of the US government’s coronavirus response. He is a leading member of Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force.

Dr Fauci struck some optimistic notes on Sunday, predicting the US would be “approaching a degree of normality” by the end of the current year.

“What does ‘normal’ mean?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked him.

Dr Fauci responded: “If normality means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us, I mean, I can't predict that.”

He added: “I think we're going to have a significant degree of normality beyond what the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year. ... As we get into the fall and the winter, by the end of the year, I agree with the president completely that we will be approaching a degree of normality. It may or may not be precisely the way it was in November of 2019, but it'll be much much better than what we're doing right now.”

More than 28.1m people in the US have been infected, and nearly 500,000 people have died, a grisly death toll that Dr Fauci described as unprecedented in modern US history.

“Half a million deaths. It’s just — it’s terrible. It is historic. We haven’t seen anything even close to this for well over a hundred years since the 1918 pandemic of influenza,” he said.

Mr Biden’s administration has faced blowback from some parts of the electorate in recent weeks for being noncommittal about when some schoolchildren can head back to in-person classes.

Mr Biden and his communications team have sent mixed messages about what the administration’s goal is for reopening schools during his first 100 days in office. The president himself has said it is his goal to have elementary schoolchildren in classrooms five days a week by the end of his first 100 days, while his press secretary, Jen Psaki, has said schools would be considered “open” if they held in-person classes even just one day per week.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers — the second-largest teachers union in the US — admitted to NBC on Sunday that there is no “perfect solution” to the problem of getting every child and teacher back into classrooms.

“There's no perfect solution, but frankly I think New York City has done a pretty good job in terms of showing the way,” Ms Weingarten said.

"There's a roadmap now, and so you actually can follow that roadmap in terms of defining those risks. And, I think between the CDC guidance as well as the resources President Biden is trying to get in the $1.9 trillion [legislative] package, we have the highway or the roadmap that allows us" to reopen schools, she said.

Ms Weingarten stressed that teacher should be given priority access to Covid vaccine shots, which is already happening in several states.