“The US still had too many Covid cases for pandemic in country to end” said Dr Anthony Fauci, USA’s top expert on viral diseases in an interview given to Axios.

“The endgame is to suppress the virus,” Fauci said. “Right now, we’re still in pandemic mode, because we have 160,000 new infections a day.”

He said that in a country as big as the USA, the number of daily infections needed to go below 10,000 to know that the country was moving towards ending the pandemic.

Fauci had mentioned this benchmark in an interview to Journal of the American Medical Association in August 2020.

This year in March, Fauci had warned against loosening restrictions before daily infections fell below 10,000. USA experienced lowest point in the pandemic in June. But even thenm number of daily infections was about 11,000. The cases have spiked with arrival of the Delta variant.

Fauci said that vaccines were important and instrumental in combating the pandemic. He said that when majority of the population was vaccinated, USA will still have infections but it would not be a large scale public health concern