Since mid-January, when it became clear that the novel coronavirus had escaped from Wuhan and would make its way to the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci has been waging a war—a war of persuasion. He’s had to convince a diverse, federalist, hyper-partisan country to take the threat of the virus seriously. And in order to do that, he’s had to first convince President Donald Trump. This has posed certain challenges, and certain risks. “I take the tack that I will say what’s true and whatever happens, happens,” Fauci told me. And lately, that approach has been winning. On Sunday, Trump extended the national social-distancing guidelines for another 30 days after Fauci showed Trump models that projected 2.2 million Americans could die if nothing was done; Trump had proposed reopening the country for Easter. This morning, Vanity Fair spoke by phone with Fauci from his office at the National Institutes of Health as he raced between meetings. The interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Vanity Fair: Off the top, I wanted to know: Where are we now? How are you feeling about how we've marshaled the response?

Anthony Fauci: Well, I mean, obviously we’re still right in the middle of a very serious situation. The United States is a very large country. We have different levels of activity in different parts of the country. I mean, as you know, New York has been hit particularly hard and they’ve suffered greatly. They’ve responded, I think in an extraordinarily powerful way. We hope—we don’t know for sure—that we’re starting to see the leveling off of new admissions to hospitals. That’s the first sign that we may be making some headway with our mitigation strategies. But multiple cities are at different timing of what their problem is. We have New Orleans now, we have a situation in Detroit and Chicago. So you will see different waves of increases, sharp inflections, peaks, and then turn arounds. I think the most important thing that we need to do as a nation is to very aggressively implement the mitigation strategies.

How has it complicated our response that we’ve had so many different approaches across the states? You have some governors and mayors taking aggressive approaches and then in Florida, until recently, the beaches were open. How would it have helped us if we had a uniform national response?

Well, you know, certainly the recommendations that came out in the original guidelines we put up almost 15 days ago [could have been followed]. We live in a country where there’s a lot of independence. Some governors and states followed the guidelines most times, but sometimes they didn’t. And I think in those situations in which they didn’t, you could have avoided difficulties. But right now, there’s no doubt that even though it’s difficult to quantify precisely, there’s no doubt that the mitigation implementation is having an impact. I cannot imagine anybody disagrees with that. I believe you would be much worse off if we didn’t institute these physical separation guidelines. I think that that is why it is a proper, correct, and prudent decision to extend these another 30 days because we are by no means out of the woods. It’s still very difficult.

I know that it was touch-and-go for a while whether Trump would extend the guidelines. I’m glad that your point of view prevailed. Backing up, when did you first get a call that there was a novel coronavirus outbreak in China? I mean, how early were you attuned to this?

Well, it was the very beginning of January when there was a report from China that there were about 24 cases and it was incorrectly thought to be only animal-to-human spreading. And in Wuhan, as it turned out there, it was very likely that there was human-to-human spreading weeks before the outbreak in the wet market.