In a brief interview with Greta Van Susteren that aired Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he “strongly suspects” COVID-19 deaths will go down in the winter.

Fauci was asked if he expects there to be another surge of coronavirus causes this winter due to the Delta variant or any other expected variants.

“Fortunately, right now, over the last few weeks, we've seen a turnaround in the slope in going down in both cases and hospitalizations. Deaths are still up, but it's really flattening, so it's a lagging indicator,” Fauci said on "Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren."

Fauci did not predict the pandemic would end soon. He said that overcoming the Delta variant would depend on the success of vaccinating the approximately 68 million Americans who are still unvaccinated.

“I strongly suspect that you're going to start seeing the deaths go down similar to the hospitalizations. How quickly they go down and how thoroughly they go down is going to depend a lot on a number of circumstances, which will be influenced by things like the colder weather, people doing things indoors, how well they go by the CDC guidelines of, when you have a lot of infection in the community, even though you're vaccinated, when you are not home but outside congregate settings in the public, wearing masks, I think would be very prudent,” he said.

There have been over 700,000 virus-related deaths in the U.S.

The CDC coronavirus data shows that COVID-19 cases are going down in the U.S. but only 56% of people in the county are vaccinated.

Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, was asked by The New Yorker if there will be a surge in cases this winter as bad as last winter.

“I think we can definitively say no," Jha said. "But what people don’t appreciate about Delta is that it finds pockets of unvaccinated people and just rips through them. If you’re an older person living in this country, and you’re not vaccinated, it’s going to be a very bad winter."

Coronavirus