Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, warned once again on Thursday about complacency in the battle against Covid-19 as he expressed concern over the “disturbingly high” level of daily new infections in the US.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and top medical adviser of President Joe Biden, noted to CNN’s Anderson Cooper how deaths and hospitalisations from the coronavirus are currently falling.

“But the number that is disturbing, Anderson, is the number of cases each day,” he said. “When we had the big spike that we’ve discussed so many times that went way up to two to three or more hundred thousand cases per day, then it came back down. But now it’s plateaued at a disturbingly high level.”

The daily new infection rate is currently hovering at around 60,000.

“When you’re at that level, there is the risk of getting a surge back up,” Fauci warned. “So the way we’re looking at it now, it’s almost a race between getting people vaccinated and this surge that seems to want to increase and do what’s going on, for example, in Europe where they’re having some surges now that are really quite alarming.”

Between three to four million people are now receiving the Covid-19 shot in the US each day, Fauci noted, with more than a third of the population having received at least the first dose.

“So if we could just, as I’ve said so many times, hang in there a bit longer to get each day more and more people by the millions getting vaccinated to the point where we’ll have enough people vaccinated that the risk of that surge will diminish greatly,” said Fauci.

It was now a case of dishing out vaccines and “not pulling back on public health measures,” he added. “Now is not the time, as I’ve said so many times, to declare victory prematurely. We still have a considerable risk there that we need to get by.”