Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Friday, March 12th. I'm Naila Boudou. Today, we wrap up our special

COVID series by asking whether it's work, culture, or everyday life. What does a post-pandemic future

look like? But first, today's one big thing. Dr. Anthony Fauci on the early days of dealing with the

pandemic. If there's one person who became a household name during the early days of the pandemic,

it's Dr. Anthony Fauci. When we had the first case of COVID-19 in this country, people said,

should we be doing anything different? I said, we should not be doing anything different right now.

Then I said, however, underline 15 times, things could get much worse quickly, so we have to be prepared.

And then finally, we went into the Oval Office and the president sat me and Deb, and I believe it was

Barb Redfield and Alex Azor, and the vice president was there, and he said, well, what's going on?

And at that point, it was clear that New York was getting hit by cases that were coming not from China

directly, but were coming from Italy and then essentially the rest of Europe. There was a reasonable

back and forth where the president was saying, is this something we absolutely need to do?

And remember, he looked me straight and he says, what do you think? I said, yes, I believe things

are going to get worse before they get better. So if you really don't want a big influx of cases

coming in from Europe, we really need to shut down Italy. And then they said, well, you can't

just do Italy. You've got to do essentially all the countries. And we did. We were getting

dribs and drabs of information from China that was, you know, it was a progression of, oh my goodness,

oh my goodness, oh my goodness, kind of thing. Remember, the first case that we had in the United

States was like January 21st and we didn't know about community spread until later. So we were

going on the information we had. What surprised me the most was the rolling out of knowledge. So it

went from animal to human, no human to human spread, human to human spread, but not very efficient.

Well, human to human spread and it's pretty efficient. And then the real showstopper was

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