When the pandemic is over, Dr. Anthony Fauci already knows his first food order at the local bar: a beer and a burger.
In a recent interview with Los Angeles radio station 94.7 The Wave, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases explained that's one of the things he misses the most.
Fauci said his wife, nurse and bioethicist Christine Grady, works with him at the National Institute of Health. They typically get home late, since they both fall "in the category of workaholics."
"And what I used to like a lot, was rather than go home and cook, on the way home stop at a favorite small restaurant or a bar and sit there and have a beer and a hamburger and just relax," he said, adding they have not been to a sit-down restaurant since February. "Everything we've done is take out," he said. "I'd like to get back to that kind of normality, just to sort of reconnect with the way things were when they were normal."
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On Wednesday, Fauci told CNBC’s Meg Tirrell during a special edition of the “Healthy Returns” conference that the United States could return to some semblance of normality by mid-fall if enough people get vaccinated against COVID-19. That would mean people could safely resume dining inside at restaurants, enjoying the theater and safely returning children to school, he said.
“So if we can get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated by let’s say the end of the second, the beginning of the third quarter – by the time we get into mid-fall of 2021, we can be approaching some level of normality,” he said.
Returning to normal will require somewhere between 75% and 85% of the population to get inoculated against COVID-19, he said. That would create an “umbrella” of immunity to prevent further spread of the virus, Fauci said.
“That would be able to protect even the vulnerables who have not been vaccinated, or those in which the vaccine has not been effective,” he said.