Understand that it was very serious and it was brand new to the world stage.
That Fauci may or may not have said no masks were necessary is irrelevant, as the medical community was first learning about this virus and how to deal with it. Trump admitted, in an interview with Bob Woodward, that he knew that it was serious but he didn't want to panic the populace. Of course, the populace had every right to know in order to prepare for the virus onslaught. So what was the "hoax" perpetrated by the Democrats? There was no "hoax" nor is there any excuse for Trump's 2-month delay in dealing with it while he ranted about the Democratic "hoax".
Wasn't serious, eh?
On 30 January 2020, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19 to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and issued a set of Temporary Recommendations.
It was serious but nobody knew it at the time. The public knew about it as soon as we got the information. However because we believed it was not likely to be a problem here, we didn't take many precautions, just like we didn't for H1N1, Ebola, West Niles virus, none of those things. How many years of deadly diseases and viruses did we live through just fine without lifting a finger? We expected Covid to be the same.
It's so easy being critical looking in the rear view mirror, isn't it? You armchair quarterbacks always have the answers, don't you? 200,000 Americans lost their lives to the common flu during the 2 terms of DumBama. Are you going to blame him for that? If not, why not? After all, we've had flu vaccines for decades, and he still allowed it to happen.

We knew and had generations of research on the flu. No excuse for it, right? It was all his fault, right?
Trump is no more responsible for Covid than he was for the California wildfires, or Bush was for hurricanes. You leftists lie so much you don't realize how obvious you are when you do it, because you do it constantly.
The U.N.'s global health chief says the world was lucky that the swine flu pandemic was relatively mild.
www.nbcnews.com