Asked by @jaketapper why admin didn’t announce distancing guidelines until March 16, almost a month after Fauci and others recommended it, Fauci said: “We look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken, sometime it’s not.”

Could lives have been saved if guidelines went into effect in February? Fauci says on @CNNSotu: “Obviously you can logically say if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier you could have saved lives. Obviously no one is going to deny that.”

Fauci added: “Obviously if we had right from the very beginning, shut every thing down, it might have been very different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.” He added these are complex decisions