Dr. Tina Tan, a board member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in an interview, “If you don’t keep the restrictions or make them stricter, you’re going to have more people infected, hospitalized, and dying from the disease.”
The ISDA, in a statement this week said, “Statewide efforts alone will not be sufficient to control this public health crisis.”
“A strong nationwide plan that supports and enforces social distancing — and recognizes that our health and our economy are inextricably linked — should remain in place until public health and medical experts indicate it can safely be lifted.”
A group of House Democrats have also called on Trump to order a national shelter-in-place.
Carroll, the Indiana U. doctor, with Harvard University professor of global health Ashish Jha, published an article Monday in The Atlantic titled “Don’t Halt Social Distancing. Instead, Do It Right.”
Carroll and Jha said the U.S. needs to do two things to stop the spread of the coronavirus and set the stage for getting the country back to normal: Lock down the country, and start “massive, coordinated testing of the population.”
“First, we need a true national pause — a cessation of all nonessential activities,” they wrote.
“It has to last at least two weeks, and everyone needs to participate.”
“If we all distanced ourselves from one another for that long, the outbreak would slow down significantly. Isolating individual family members may not be socially tenable. Because of that, infections are going to continue within families, but broader spread can be curtailed.”
Carroll and Jha wrote that widespread testing must also be done because, “Even today, we don’t know how many people are infected in the community and how many people without symptoms are spreading the infection to others.”
“Such testing must be organized by epidemiologists experienced in this area, not by health-care providers. We need to know the full extent of those who are sick with COVID-19, but we also need to know where the virus is hiding. By setting up testing centers across the nation, we can avoid spreading the infection through our health-care system,” they wrote.
Carroll, like other experts who spoke with CNBC, said that Trump talking about easing instead of significantly tightening restrictions on social and business interactions is not helping stop the pandemic.
“I think he’s eager for good news and eager to have this spun in the right way,” Carroll said.
But, “He has a very large microphone, and if the wrong messages get out about what we should be doing, this is potentially devastating,” Carroll said.
“I just think that the constant pressure to pull a date out of the air without data” about the true transmission rate and the effectiveness of restrictions “is the wrong way to approach this,” Carroll said.
“We’ve got no evidence to show this is under control, so given that, I don’t think there’s any use in setting a date to get back to normal,” he said. “Continuing to promise people that we could or we know is the wrong way to go about it.”
He noted that in Italy, where the disease has progressed further than in the United States, and other parts of Europe where that is the case, tight social restrictions remain in place.
“None of them are saying this is the time to relax,” Carroll said. “They’re 10 days ahead.”
“This is not the time to relax.”
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/27/coronavirus-fight-doctor-calls-for-united-states-to-lock-down.html