Monday on CNN, chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta said we were “right back to square one” when it comes to flattening the curve of the coronavirus pandemic.
Lemon asked, “Is this virus on brink of getting out of control again?”
Gupta said, “I worry it is. It was 18 states that were seeing significant growth on Monday of last week. So a week later you see five more states added to the list.”
Lemon asked, “You have heard what the Trump administration is saying about this, claiming the case surge is all about an increase in testing. There’s alarming data from states that show that is not true.”
Gupta said, “It’s not true. This is frustrating this many months into this. The only thing really that other countries have been able to use to be able to bring the case count low into the teens or hundreds, not the tens of thousands, has been robust testing. Finding people who have the virus, isolate them to break the cycle of transmission.”
He continued, “How do you explain hospitalization? If you look at hospitalizations in all the states you mentioned they are also going up. There’s Arizona, they have been going up. They should be going down. 2,000 hospitalizations? At this point in the pandemic that is not what we should be seeing. Same thing you see in Texas, same thing you see in Florida as well. I’m particularly worried about Florida. My parents live in Florida. This is a state where 20% of the population is over the age of 65. We know that the virus — there is a vulnerable population, people who are elderly, have preexisting conditions. Seventy-five percent of the ICU beds are already occupied in Florida.”
He added, “We kept talking about flattening the curve so as to not tax the hospital system. We are right back to square one in terms of that discussion again, flattening the curve. That was March. We should be having a new discussion, which is ‘bring this down to near zero.’ Instead, we’re talking about how to keep the hospitals from redlining once again.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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