We shouldn’t end the restrictions until we have 10,000 cases a day – or significantly fewer

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It should be emphasized that he is (I think) talking about the benchmark for completely pandemic restrictions. He is willing to scale back restrictions on higher levels of community diffusion, provided we don’t remove them altogether.

And even Texas hasn’t. The mask mandate has been lifted and businesses are open at full capacity, but local authorities have the power to issue new regulations based on the number of recent hospital admissions in their community. We shouldn’t treat constraints like a light switch, going from strict capacity limits to nothingFauci warns Jake Tapper in the clip below. But Texas hasn’t done that either. They had 75 percent capacity for many companies before Greg Abbott’s new order approved a full reopening. It was a gradual adjustment.

Still. Think how difficult it will be to hit a benchmark of 10,000 cases per day – or “significantly less”, ideally, in Fauci’s words. The last time we had only 10,000 confirmed cases in one day in the United States was March 22, 2020, 348 days ago. Aside from a handful of days last May and June, it’s also been almost a full year since we’ve seen fewer than * 20,000 * cases per day. And don’t forget, those case counts were recorded at a time when America’s testing capacity was still weak, far less extensive than it is now. In reality, we generated far more than 10,000 infections per day last March; the low number of cases was due to the fact that we were still at a primitive stage of detecting them at the time.

Which means it’s possible we haven’t seen a day with fewer than 10,000 infections in a year, possibly since February 2020. Then ask: Realistically, the number of cases will drop below 10,000 a day, even after everyone who wants a vaccine, got one? About 15 percent of Americans insist they don’t get the chance under any circumstances. That’s 45 million people. Even when we take into account that many will be immunized the old-fashioned way and some children are unlikely to be very contagious, we are still talking about a pool of millions who will remain vulnerable to the virus. Can’t they mutually cause 10,000 infections per day? Especially during a more contagious winter season?

A benchmark of 10K per day then seems like a terribly high bar for a return to full normalcy. Even if we mitigate those 15 percent of holdouts and convince almost everyone to get vaccinated, it will be a matter of many months for the entire population to have access to the injection. And assuming we can get everyone ready by September, we’ll probably have to turn around and all get boosters again, as the virus threatens to have a resurgence in colder weather.

In other words, pandemic restrictions are basically forever. No strict restrictions, perhaps, but still. Recommended masks next winter, 75 percent or 50 percent capacity restaurants?

Perhaps Americans are getting used to the idea:

The irony is that the same poll has the number who think the pandemic is getting a little or much better, at 60 percent, the highest it has ever been. Americans are getting more optimistic! And … also more resigned that their lives will remain disrupted until next year.

What Fauci and his colleagues on Biden’s team are really concerned about are the new variants. It is not certain that we will end up with a fourth wave of the virus driven by more contagious strains, but it is certainly possible:

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said on Thursday that the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant is appear between 20% and 30% of viruses obtained from surveillance controls in states such as Florida, California and Georgia. Those numbers – just 1% -2% four weeks ago – are likely to double within 10 days, he said.

When that variant showed up in 50% in surveillance checks in parts of Europe and the Middle East, “we saw (saw) a big increase in the number of (general) cases” – and the same could happen in the US, he said.

“Anything the governors are doing now to relax all the public health recommendations we have made will only be a great invitation for this virus to spread faster and further,” Osterholm told CNN’s “New Day.”

Watch the first few minutes here as Fauci sets out his potentially impossible evaluation. For what it’s worth, Biden doesn’t seem to be hurt by the extreme caution advised by his advisers. Sleepy Joe has 70 percent approval for dealing with the pandemic, including 44 percent among Republicans, according to a new AP poll. That’s probably mostly in response to the increasing pace of vaccination, but Biden’s continued emphasis on masks and not reopening too soon isn’t a problem for him at this point. We’ll see what it looks like in two months if and when tens of millions of people have been immunized and the White House is still urging governors not to open too soon.

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