Moving on

Fox News Channel's Bill Hemmer on Tuesday grilled White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany about rising coronavirus cases in Florida and asked about where Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci have been in recent weeks.

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McEnany replied that they’re “hard at work” and that she’s “constantly gathering information from them.”

  The Hill

Fauci hasn't heard: the pandemic is over.  Trump beat the coronavirus.

Speaking on NPR, Fauci said his last meeting with the president came when he and other health experts informed Trump about the nation's vaccine development efforts.

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Asked by NPR whether the increases in case counts stemmed from states reopening too quickly, Fauci said that it's "tough to make broad statements" about the virus. But he noted that there were "clearly" some states that began reopening before hitting the benchmarks "they needed to get."

He also said that people's behavior could be responsible for an uptick in rising cases.

"States may say they’re in this particular stage, but then you might find people are not adhering to the guidelines," he said.

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Fauci, a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, warned last week that the pandemic was far from over, noting that "we're still at the beginning of it."

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"Just because you don't see the public press conferences does not mean that there’s [not] a lot of activity going on and a lot of attention paid to what we do," he said earlier this month. "The seriousness with which the task force takes and the effort that we put into this is really substantial. Even though numerically the number of meetings might be less, the activity is still really quite intense."

  The Hill

Trump just doesn't give a shit. He's got a campaign to conduct.

Also, Fauci confirms that the original CDC admonition not to wear masks was meant to cover the failure to ramp up PPE production.

Speaking on TheStreet, Fauci discusses how effective face masks are at preventing COVID-19 infection and why they weren’t recommended from the start."Masks are not 100 percent protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who maybe feels well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else," Fauci said.

"But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work,” Fauci added.

“The important thing is actually physical separation,” Fauci said, adding that the combination of social distancing and face masks is the best way for the public to mitigate the spread and reduce transmission while maintaining some normalcy by venturing in public.

He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.

He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”

  The Hill

Also, contact tracers seem to have a big snag: People aren't answering their calls.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.