US doctor on life after coronavirus: ‘I don’t think we should ever shake hands again'

The Covid-19 will bring an end to the handshake as we know it, if Dr Anthony Fauci has his way.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, one of the top pundit in the battle against Sars-CoV-2 the U.S, told the Wall Street journal podcast on Tuesday that when the nation starts to ease off lockdown restrictions, some habits have to change.

“When you gradually come back, you don’t jump into it with both feet,” Fauci told podcast host Kate Linebaugh on The Journal, talking about what life might look like when it eventually starts returning to normal. “You say, what are the things you could still do and still approach normal? One of them is absolute compulsive hand-washing. The other is you don’t ever shake anybody’s hands.”

“I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease; it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country,” he later added.

When questioned when strict social distancing steps could be rescinded Dr. Anthony Fauci stated, “It isn’t like a light switch on and off, it’s a gradual pulling back on certain of the restrictions and to try and get society a bit back to normal.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that it might be necessary to reassess the national social distancing measures that President Donald Trump has stated will be in order till 30th April, banking on the course of the pathogen. But recommended that the structure to swiftly point out cases and isolate people needed to be in order ahead of easing restriction.

“If you’re even going to consider a relaxation of this stringent physical separation, you absolutely have to have in place the capability,” he said. “That means easy testing, widely available, the people committed to doing the identification, isolation and contact tracing, the facilities to isolate people.”

Government at a state at national level are rushing to get those capability in place, he said.

However, Fauch stated that by the end of April, he hopes to see things normalizing: “We hope that by the end of this 30 day extension that we will start to see the light at the end of the tunnel where we can say we’re pretty confident that we can gradually start approaching some degree of normality.”

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