Public-health initiatives like mask-wearing and social distancing that have been shown to successfully limit the spread of the novel coronavirus might also play an important role in suppressing the severity of the upcoming flu season, according to White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“Steps to fight the flu and COVID-19 overlap greatly,” he said during a virtual briefing on Thursday. “We don’t want those two diseases together.”

Fauci warned that the nation’s health-care system might soon be confronted with a “diagnostic challenge” if there is, in fact, a devastating one-two punch of the seasonal flu plus the coronavirus.

“There’s considerable concern as we enter the fall and the winter months and into the flu season that we’ll have that dreaded overlap of two respiratory diseases, namely influenza and COVID-19,” said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In the United States, on average, between nine