US: Anthony Fauci details issues underlining virus crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Some states did not pay attention to the benchmarks or the checkpoints. Others did it fine, but the citizenry within a state or within a city actually did an all-or-none phenomenon. They said: 'we were locked down, so now we're just gonna let it fly.' Now you can say, no, that didn't happen, but the numbers tell you what happened," Fauci said.

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

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