Dr. Anthony Fauci: When this is all over, we should stop shaking hands permanently
I’m personally not crazy about all of the worship for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become one of the few voices of reason, sanity and calm during the pandemic. Dr. Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and he’s part of Trump’s coronavirus taskforce. Dr. Fauci has been blanketing the media for weeks to provide factual information in an apolitical way. That’s it. He seems like a good doctor and he’s doing his job. He’s not a “heartthrob” or a sexy zaddy. I do appreciate that he’s perfectly willing to spread his apolitical science-gospel to the people through all kinds of media. The other night, he did a link-up interview on Desus & Mero. He’s doing interviews on talk shows and all kinds of radio stations. And now he’s doing podcasts too – Dr. Fauci appears on The Journal podcast (associated with the Wall Street Journal) and he chatted about “the return to normal” and whether we, as a society, should just stop shaking hands. Some quotes:
The light at the end of the tunnel: The NIAID director hoped to see “light at the end of the tunnel” by the end of April. Speaking about the eventual return to normal life, Dr. Fauci said: “When you gradually come back, you don’t jump into it with both feet. 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.” He also suggested that people might want to wear “cloth face protection” if they could not avoid being within six feet of others as life starts its return to normal.
The return to normalcy should come in phases: Asked to paint a picture of what life may look like once the worst of the novel coronavirus has passed, Dr. Fauci said he could see the country phasing back to normality by doing such things as limiting the number of people who can be at a restaurant or event at any one time.
An antibody test: “…When this goes down, and gets down to almost zero, when we get to that, then I think what’s important… there is an antibody test that will be widely distributed pretty soon, in the next few weeks, that will allow you to know whether or not you’ve actually been infected. I can imagine a situation where you take an antibody test and you are absolutely positive that you were infected and you did well, then you could hug the heck out of your grandmother and not worry about it.”
We should never shake hands again: “I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to free-flying lack of attention to what transmissibility of infections are. I think that people are going to be careful. 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.”
Because I’m a blogger who works from home, I’m not shaking hands with people on a regular basis anyway. I do shake hands with men in various business situations (car dealerships, lawyers) but in my everyday pre-corona life… I could go weeks without handshakes. But I’m sure most people live differently, especially if you work in an office and/or sales/banking/business, public service, etc. So will you stop shaking hands now? Will you do the “namaste” prayer hands? Will you just do the business-nod of acknowledgment? Also, I’m very curious about the antibody test.
PS… I really need the good doctor to STOP TOUCHING HIS FACE. He is shaking hands with his face!!
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
