Dr. Fauci, an avid runner who grew up playing basketball and baseball, is a fan of the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees. He says he will feel comfortable returning to a stadium when the level of infection is far lower than it is now.

“I would love to be able to have all sports back,” Dr. Fauci said. “But as a health official and a physician and a scientist, I have to say, right now, when you look at the country, we’re not ready for that yet.”

The following interview with Dr. Fauci was condensed and edited for clarity.

Wagner and Belson: When and how can sports return?

Dr. Fauci: What we need to do is get it, as a country and as individual locations, under control. That sometimes takes longer than you would like, and if we let our desire to prematurely get back to normal, we can only get ourselves right back in the same hole we were in a few weeks ago.

We’ve got to make sure that when we try to get back to normal, including being able to play baseball in the summer and football in the fall and basketball in the winter, that when we do come back to some form of normality, we do it gradually and carefully. And when cases do start to rebound — which they will, no doubt — that we have the capability of identifying, isolating and contact tracing.

Sports are a business, and they have a financial imperative to get back as soon as possible. Some governors and mayors have discussed the possibility of sports’ returning without fans. But there are still hundreds of staff members who have to run the stadium, the clubhouse, etc. What needs to be done to make sure they’re also safe?

The things we need to do to the best of our ability are try and keep the six-foot distance and wear face coverings. And do the kind of pure hygiene things you do to prevent the spread of respiratory infections: washing hands frequently; wearing gloves, particularly food service, and they do that anyway; changing gloves frequently. And if you are in a stadium, make sure that if there are people there, they maintain that physical distance because the virus doesn’t travel that much farther than that.