“We don’t want to get complacent and think … ‘oh things are going in the right direction, we can pull back a bit because we do have circulating in the country a variant from the U.K. that’s in over 20 states right now,” Fauci said, pointing out that the variant is more easily transmitted from person to person.

Fauci also said that, while not official, preliminary data shows the U.K. variant to be more deadly. “I’m pretty convinced there is a degree of increase in seriousness of the actual infection,” he said.