US: Anthony Fauci details issues underlining virus crisis

Dr. Anthony Fauci, U.S. top infectious diseases expert, has detailed how coronavirus pandemic rapidly spre as public health experts like him faced death threats for proposing measures to resolve crisis.

Fauci was speaking Wednesday at an online public health discussion hosted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and moderated by CNN's Dr. Sunjay Gupta.

"And, you kw, getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it's amazing," Fauci said.

Fauci said public health experts in United States h laid out elaborate plans to deal with potential pandemic as early as 2005.

plan, he said, was evaluated by independent experts at John Hopkins, a private research university in Maryland, who rated it best in world.

But plan fell apart after President Donald Trump's ministration declined to institute a unified national response to pandemic by encouraging each state to chart its own course through crisis.

"We live in a very big country and we often leave decisions about implementation of things at local level. And what we've seen is a great disparity in how individual states, cities, et cetera, responded," Fauci ted.

problem was compounded by states that pursued disparate reopening strategies in wake of leership from White House.

"Some states did t pay attention to benchmarks or checkpoints. Ors did it fine, but citizenry within a state or within a city actually did an all-or-ne phemen. y said: 'we were locked down, so w we're just gonna let it fly.' w you can say, , that didn't happen, but numbers tell you what happened," Fauci said.

From re, pandemic exploded in states that pursued an aggressive reopening strategy.

And as crisis has spre to all reaches of country, with escalating deaths and little sense of endgame, a chasm has widened between President Donald Trump and top health experts like Fauci. result: daily delivery of a mixed mess to public at a moment when coherence is most needed.