(CNN)In the span of a week and a half, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States has doubled, yet officials are saying this is still the first wave of the pandemic.
“We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Facebook and Twitter livestream Monday. “I would say, this would not be considered a wave. It was a surge, or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline … that really never got down to where we wanted to go.”
Revelers celebrate the Fourth of July on Coney Island in New York.
The packed holiday crowds over the weekend contributed to that surge, leading to a shortage of hospital beds as well as threatening to infect others and set the economy back even further. This virus is notorious for how contagious it is — and how easily people can infect others without symptoms.
“We are in free fall,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“You see the footage of what happened this past weekend. And people are either naive to the influence of their actions, or they’re simply resigned to ignore it.”
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