US President Joe Biden on Monday expressed hope of tackling the coronavirus but said it will take a while before the nation overcomes the pandemic.
“I'm going to shut down the virus, but I never said I'd do it in two months," the newly-elected leader said. He was responding to a question on his statements about his administration's efforts to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months, especially when two months ago he had said that he is going to shut down the virus.
"I said it took a long time to get here; it's going to take a long time to beat it,” Biden told reporters at the White House.
“Correct me if I'm wrong; I've been doing other things this morning, speaking with foreign leaders. But I think this is one of the first days that the number has actually come down -- the number of deaths -- and the number on a daily basis and the number of hospitalisations, et cetera,” he said.
“It's going to take time. It's going to take a heck of a lot of time,” he said, stressing on “mass disregard” of the warnings about not wearing masks and social distancing.
Emphasising that the death toll in the US is about 410,000, he said the prediction has been somewhere between a total of 600,000 and 660,000 fatalities before they "begin to turn the corner in a major way".
Biden said the vaccination is a move in the right direction.
“So it's beginning to move. I'm confident we will beat this. We will beat this. But we're still going to be talking about this in the summer. We're still going to be dealing with this issue in early fall,” he said.
Biden exuded confidence that by summer, the US would be on its way to heading toward herd immunity and increasing the access for people who aren't on the list. Time is of the essence, he said.
With PTI inputs
