Dr. Anthony Fauci And The President Of The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce On The Path Forward To Beating Coronavirus
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Dr. Anthony Fauci and U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Suzanne Clark discussed best practices for business leaders and the path forward to beating coronavirus and fully reopening America.
Below is a selection of quotes from today’s event. If you use the following comments, please mention the discussion was from a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation event today.
On Masks
“As a public health official that I would urge the leaders, the local political and other leaders in states and cities and towns to be as forceful as possible in getting your citizenry to wear masks. Masks are important as part of the physical, distant, physical distancing is the most important. But practically, when you're living your life and trying to open up the country, you were going to come into contact with people. And for that reason, we know that masks are really important and we should be using them. Everyone.”
“We need to try to engender all of us a feeling of both personal and societal responsibility…..I understand that we have a spirit of independence in our country that was there from the very birth of our country. But this is really different. This is everybody pulling together in a very serious situation. If we could get more people to understand that, hopefully we'll get more people who'd be willing to wear masks.”
“The minimal thing that you should do is the kinds of things that we've been talking about: constantly wearing a mask, maintaining six feet of distance, avoiding crowds, washing your hands where possible as much as you can…Those are the fundamental things that you need to do because the virus will not be able to do anything if you keep physical distance.”
On the Business Community
“The business community is so essential to everything we do, even our health. I mean, we have a healthy community. You have to have a healthy business community.”
“The role of the private sector is paramount. At the federal government, academia is part of the private sector. Pharmaceutical companies are part of the private sector. So every single candidate, therapeutic diagnostic and certainly vaccine that we're dealing with right now and trying to develop has a major input from the private sector. So there is no way government alone be it is a federal government or state and local government is going to fix this. It's a marriage and a collaboration between government authorities and the private sector.”
On Reopening
“But always remember that safety and the health of the children and the teachers comes first. And I think if we keep that in mind, we'll go a long way to getting the schools open safely.”
“We're going to get over this….It will end. It will end through public health measures and science. I can tell you will come to our rescue, hopefully sooner rather than later.”
“The public health apparatus shouldn't be looked upon as the obstacle in the way of opening. It should be a gateway, a vehicle and a facilitation of opening, because if you follow them, it is unlikely you'll be able to you will have to backtrack because of the surge, the way we're seeing going on in several states right now.”
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On Black and Latinx Populations
“If you look at minority populations, particularly African-Americans, Latino X to some extent to Native Americans, that there are two things that go on with them that make them bear a disproportionately more serious burden of Covid 19….The kinds of jobs and the kind of economic strata in which minority populations, particularly African-Americans, find themselves in, put them in a more vulnerable position to get infected, it's less likely by the jobs that many of them have that they're able to protect themselves by being at home doing work through telework…. Generally, they are disproportionately more out there exposed in situations where they may not be able to prevent themselves from getting infected.”
“So when you look at the African-American and the minority population in general, they have a significantly higher incidence of those underlying conditions that lead to a poor outcome. So when you put those things together, greater incidence of getting infected, greater prevalence and incidents of comorbidities which make your outcome worse. It's entirely easy to understand the data that you just mentioned, that the minority communities are at much greater risk of getting into trouble with Covid 19. You can address some of them immediately by putting resources for better and easier testing, identification, isolation, contact tracing in areas where there's demographic overrepresentation of this minority.”
“So they have easy accessibility to these things to get them diagnosed and into care quickly. We can do that now. What's going to take longer to fix is the decades and decades and decades old social determinants of health, which we must address because they can be overcome and over a period of time we can diminish that disparity of these underlying conditions in the minority population.”
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