Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that he felt depressed when looking at coronavirus data and warned that the United States first wave of infections never ended.

During a Harvard Medical School Grand Rounds talk, Fauci presented a slide comparing coronavirus cases in the United States to those in the European Union. Even during lockdown, he pointed out, the U.S. always had a high baseline of cases around 20,000 cases a day, compared to the EUs baseline, which went below 10,000 cases a day.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stressed that efforts to reopen the economy had caused surges in both regions, but that the U.S. was undoubtedly the worst hit country in the world. He called its inability to lower its baseline extraordinarily unacceptable.

Every day when we get with the task force and we go over the data from the night before, I keep looking at that curve [of COVID-19 cases], and I get more depressed and more depressed about the fact that we never really get down to the baseline that Id like, Fauci said when answering a question about a potential second surge of the coronavirus in the U.S.

I dont talk about second surges because were still in the first surge, he added. It isnt as if we went way down.