Former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Frieden said Sunday that the United States had been a “laggard” in addressing the coronavirus pandemic, specifically pointing to the lack of centralized information.
“I’ll be frank, we’re a laggard,” Frieden said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We are one of the best in the world in terms of the cumulative mortality rate, unlike many other countries that have high mortality rates, ours continues to increase.”
“One of the things that worries me the most is that we are not on the same page,” he added, noting the lack of uniformity in the information on state websites. “Everyone in this country should be able to know very easily what the risk is in my community and how well my community is doing to reduce that risk so that I and my family can be safer … we need to know things like cases that how many of them were isolated in 48 hours were diagnosed today. “
“This is how other countries are managing this epidemic and we can do it here too, but we must be on the same page, we must focus on the measurements that matter, we need to make them available to the public,” he said.
Frieden also addressed the issue of how to safely send children to school in the fall, and noted research on the relative safety of children who contract the virus.
“The severity of COVID is quite similar to the severity of seasonal influenza for children, but that’s only part of the equation: what about staff, what about teachers, what about people in the homes of children that those children could infect. ? He added, noting the lack of clarity about the children’s ability to contract and spread the virus.
“Any community can open schools, the difficult part is opening and keeping them open, and only a community that controls COVID and carefully opens schools can do it,” he added.
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