Fauci says current state 'really not good' as COVID-19 cases surge in US

WASHINGTON - Anthony Fauci, the US government's top infectious-diseases expert, warned on Monday "the current state is really not good".

"We had been in a situation [where] we were averaging about 20,000 new cases a day," said Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In a livestream with Director the US National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, Fauci said a series of circumstances associated with various states and cities trying to open up, in the sense of getting back to some form of normality, has led to a situation where the country now has record-breaking cases.

He said the average age of people getting infected now is 15 years younger than it was a few months ago, but young people must understand they are not "in a vacuum".

"Innocently, they could infect someone who'd infect someone, and then all of a sudden someone's grandmother or grandfather, or aunt who's getting chemotherapy for breast cancer gets infected," Fauci said.

"You're part of the propagation of the pandemic so it's your responsibility to yourself, as well as to society, to avoid infection," Fauci said.

More than 2.9 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the United States with the fatalities surpassing 130,100 as of Monday evening, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.