'We are actually knee-deep in the first wave': Fauci

The United States still has not gotten out of the first wave of Covid-19, the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, said on SiriusXM radio.

"People ask about, 'Are we concerned about a second wave?' And I keep telling people, 'What are you talking about a second wave? We are actually knee-deep in the first wave.' We've never really gotten out of it," Fauci said during a pre-recorded interview with SiriusXM Doctor Radio airing on Friday, reports the CNN.

"The thing that confuses people — not only in our own country but throughout the world — we have a very large country and it is very heterogenous. I mean, the New York metropolitan area is very, very different from Casper, Wyoming, or a town in Montana or a city in the Southwest," Fauci added.

"So things happen at different paces and different things really evolve." 

Fauci went on to explain how the metropolitan area of New York City was hit badly early on the pandemic and is now doing well — with cases, hospitalizations and deaths going down — compared with other regions of the United States.

"I believe that they will be successful. What we're seeing now in some of the southern states that you really had kind of a variability in how it was handled. Some states actually decided to open up, but did it probably prematurely and not adhering to the guidelines of a gateway to phase one to phase two. Other states actually did it well, but the people in the state took an all or none attitude," Fauci said.