Dr Anthony Fauci says that president Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings are “really draining.”

Dr Fauci, the chief infectious disease expert leading the US response, took part in one briefing on Monday that lasted two and a half hours.

He told the Associated Press that the amount of time he has to spend at the president’s briefings is impacting the work he needs to do to help tackle the pandemic.

“If I had been able to just make a few comments and then go to work, that would have really been much better,” he said.

Dr Fauci added that his work at the daily briefings is important, but that he would like them to be shorter.

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“It isn’t the idea of being there and answering questions, which I really think is important for the American public. It’s the amount of time.”

The 79-year-old added that right now there is no way of knowing if reintegration post lockdown will be a success.

“If you mean it goes way down and then come September, October, November, we have another peak, I have to say I would not be surprised,” he said.

“I would hope that if and when that occurs, that we jump all over it in a much, much more effective way than we have in these past few months.”

On Monday, Dr Fauci walked back remarks he made over the weekend where he claimed earlier mitigation on the crisis “could have saved lives.”

Dr Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that “if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

Many interpreted his comments as being critical of Mr Trump, and after his remarks on Monday, one reporter asked him whether he was speaking “voluntarily” or at the behest of the president.

“Everything I do is voluntary,” Dr Fauci said. “Please don’t even imply that.”

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, the US has upwards of 598,670 people have tested positive for coronavirus. The death toll has reached at least 25,239.