DR Anthony Fauci has warned a second wave of coronavirus is inevitable and the United States faces a "bad fall" if treatments don’t start working soon.

Speaking at The Economic Club of Washington DC, the White House’s disease expert said the killer Covid-19 virus was not going to "disappear from the planet" when lockdowns finish. 

It comes amid growing concern about a second wave coinciding with flu season, leading to the collapse of the country's healthcare system.

Dr Fauci said: "In my mind, it’s inevitable that we will have a return of the virus, or maybe even that it never went away."

Despite some parts of the country reopening already, Dr Fauci warned: "A rebound [could] get us right back in the same boat that we were in a few weeks ago."

The lockdown has taken an unprecedented toll on the US economy.

In my mind, it’s inevitable that we will have a return of the virus

The economy will shrink in the first quarter at its sharpest pace since the Great Recession.

The number of Americans seeking jobless benefits over the past five weeks has soared to 26.5 million, or nearly one in six US workers, and the Trump administration has forecast an April unemployment rate exceeding 16 per cent.

Coronavirus, which emerged in Wuhan, China, almost four months ago, has infected more than 3.1 million people worldwide and killed in excess of 217,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. 

A third of the global cases are in the United States with more than 58,000 Covid-19 deaths — making it the worst outbreak in the world.

Unlike other illnesses, Dr Fauci warned everyone can catch the virus and COVID-19 was highly transmissible. 

Treatments used so far include drugs ordinarily used to treat malaria and heartburn. 

Dr Fauci believes a vaccine will not be available for at least a year. 

Meanwhile Chinese scientists believe coronavirus won’t be eradicated and will come back in waves every year.

Because asymptomatic people are also carriers of the virus, it’s hard to contain the spread of the outbreak, Chinese medical researchers said in Beijing.

Therefore, scientists say it’s unlikely the virus will disappear the way the SARS virus did 17 years ago, as it was easier to detect who had the virus, Bloomberg News reported.

"This is very likely to be an epidemic that co-exists with humans for a long time, becomes seasonal and is sustained within human bodies," Jin Qi, director of the Institute of Pathogen Biology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said.

Source: Read Full Article