The U.S. remains “right in the middle of the first wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic, with national case counts hovering around 50,000–60,000 per day and more than 1,000 people dying daily, Anthony S. Fauci, MD, explained during a JAMA Network™ livestreamed video interview.

“We’ve got to get those numbers down,” stressed Dr. Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “If we don’t get them down, we’re going to have a really bad situation in the fall … as you get indoors and you get the complications of influenza season.”

The goal is to get the daily nationwide caseload below 10,000 before September. In the interview with JAMA Editor-in-Chief Howard Bauchner, MD, Dr. Fauci detailed these five keys physicians should be stressing with patients to protect themselves, their families and their communities from the deadly, contagious respiratory illness.

My lede. The whole shebang.