Dr. Fauci Suggests That We Won’t Be Able to Enjoy Maskless Theater Until a Year After a Vaccine Becomes Available
Yes, there are lots of jobs that you can do from home, but some of them are not possible. Yes, there are lots of in-person experiences that you can recreate online, but it’s still not the same. Many, many people are craving things to return to normal, not a new normal, but a true normal.
Yet, we don’t want to be reckless. We want to be safe. We want things to get better. We don’t want to make them worse and drag this pandemic out even longer.
Jennifer Garner recently interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci on Instagram Live. Dr. Fauci is probably a familiar name to you, but just in case it isn’t, he is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is also the top COVID expert in the United States.
In her 30-minute interview with Dr. Fauci, she asked a lot of questions about schools, sports and basically, what is it safe to do and what should we avoid doing. Dr. Fauci said that the precautions he recommends are because “about 40 to 45% of all of the people who are infected don’t have any symptoms at all…About 50% of all the transmissions occur from an asymptomatic person to an uninfected person.” Basically, you don’t know who is infected.
With that in mind, as the interview came to a close, Garner asked a question that she wanted to know for herself. She asked, “When are we going to be able to sit in a theater and watch our favorite performers up on stage again?”
The answer probably wasn’t as soon as she was hoping. Dr. Fauci responded, “I think it’s going to be a combination of a vaccine that has been around for almost a year and good public-health measures.” He added, “If we have a vaccine that’s a knockout vaccine that’s 85% to 90% effective — I don’t think we’ll get that, I’ll settle for 70% effective – if we get a really good vaccine and just about everybody gets vaccinated, you’ll have a degree of immunity in the general community that I think you can walk into a theater without a mask and feel like it’s comfortable that you aren’t going to be at risk.”
His guess was that it would be sometime towards the middle or end of 2021 before we would be able to see live theater again. Perhaps that gives some hope to the performers and the countless people who work behind the scenes on Broadway and at theaters across the country. However, that still means another year at best before we start to get back to normal.
You can watch Garner’s entire interview with Dr. Fauci below. If you want to jump ahead to the part about live theater, it’s at the very end, around 35 minutes in.
Do you miss live theater?
