Dr. Fauci says we won't see a "semblance of normality" until 2022

Dr. Anthony Fauci, arguably the most high profile medical official in the entire country, has been a ray of rational, sound minded sunshine during this pandemic. This week, however, he's has been particularly doomy and gloomy — for good reason. During a University of Melbourne panel discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic, he said that it's going to likely take years before things get even close to being back to where we were, pre-coronavirus. "I think it will be easily by the end of 2021, and perhaps even into the next year, before we start having some semblances of normality," Fauci said on Tuesday.

He added, later, that "we're not in a good place" and that "if you don't want to shut down, at least do the fundamental basic things, which are... really the flagship of which is wearing a mask."

"We can't have this very inconsistent wearing that you see, where you see some states that absolutely refuse to wear a mask," Fauci noted.

He continued a depressing but much-needed truth rampage on Wednesday when he participated in an online discussion hosted by the Journal of American Medicine, where he pointed out that the United States' bungled coronavirus response has left us well behind the benchmarks for recovery.

"We should have been way down in baseline and daily cases," Fauci said. 'We’re not."

Calling it a "bad position to be in," Fauci noted that the country is currently in the midst of a massive rise in coronavirus cases.

"When you look at the country and the heat map color, when you see red dots, which indicate that that part of the county, the city, is having an uptick in cases — all of that puts us in a precarious situation," he explained.

President Trump, meanwhile, whose administration has effectively thrown in the towel (or perhaps run it up the flagpole as a white sign of surrender) against the pandemic, has been increasingly willing to throw Fauci under his all consuming bus, describing him as a "disaster" during a recent campaign call, and speculating about firing him from the administrations coronavirus response effort.

Only tangentially related, on Thursday the first trailer for the Michael Bay-produced Pandemic-era thriller Songbird was released, depicting a world in which the Coronavirus has not been contained and people remain quarantined well into 2024. Something which, if Dr. Fauci is correct, might not be such a stretch, after all.