US top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Tuesday said COVID-19, a pandemic of "historic proportions", has the potential to be as serious as the 1918 Spanish Flu in which over 50 million people globally died.

"If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died, that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don't even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of, the possibility of...approaching that in seriousness," CNN quoted Fauci as saying.