Washington – Dr Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that the United States is likely to go a “long way” from enforcing herd immunity against the coronavirus, even as the number of confirmed cases continues to climb.
In an interview with “Face the Nation”, Gottlieb was asked how close the country is to possible herd immunity, saying the US is “probably a long way off.”
Gottlieb said that seroprevalence studies generally indicate that about 8% of the U.S. population is exposed to the coronavirus, although the rate of exposure varies depending on whether states have experienced outbreaks. In Arizona, for example, about 25% of the population is exposed based on modeling, while as many as 20% of the population in Florida is exposed, he said.
“This is approaching a level of immunity where the rate of transmission will begin to decrease,” Gottlieb said. “It’s not very immune to herds, but you should see decreases in the rate of transmission because of that level of infection.”
There have been more than 5.3 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US, and the death toll is about 170,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. While public health officials believed at the start of the spring epidemic that the death toll would drop in the fall, many states continue to hold high-profile messages.
Gottlieb said deaths and infection rates in the U.S. have been “fairly persistent.”
“We thought we would come down now, we would see dead pike and start falling, because the epidemics in the southern states started to pick up and decrease,” he said. “But there has been a fairly persistent level of infection, hospitalizations and deaths over the last few weeks.”
While some states in the south such as Florida, Arizona and Texas are reporting a drop in new cases of coronavirus, others such as California are now experiencing an uptick in infection, Gottlieb said. In addition, 14 states have positive rates above 10%, including Mississippi at 21%, Nevada at 17% and Florida at 18%.
“There are still many states with fairly high levels of positivity,” he said.
The continuing increase in coronavirus cases comes as school districts nationwide prepare to welcome students back for the new school year, which has already begun in some states. Many school systems begin the academic year with virtual learning, while others adopt a hybrid model of online school leadership and instruction.
For schools that have opened for instruction in the classroom, many have started a rough start, because hundreds of students and staff at schools in Florida and Georgia have already been forced to quarantine because of possible exposure.
However, White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Trump, said he “has no fear” about sending his own child for personal learning and comparing the death toll from COVID-19 among children to the flu.
But Gottlieb warned against making such a comparison.
“There are many that we do not understand about COVID in children,” he said. “I think we need to be careful about comparing flu and the death and illness we see in flu relative to COVID.”
Looking to the winter, the Trump administration has been working to accelerate the development and deployment of a vaccine, and set a goal through Operation Warp Speed to deliver 300 January doses of a coronavirus vaccine by January 2021.
On Friday, Mr. Trump said the government is collaborating with McKesson Corporation to distribute a coronavirus vaccine and said the U.S. military is ready as well. But Gottlieb suggested that the Trump administration should use the private sector to deliver a fax before turning to the federal government, saying, “I would not try to make the wheel here.”
“The companies, the distributors, the manufacturers distribute white faxes through the existing supply chain,” he said. “I think that if the government tries to physically take possession of these faxes and then distribute them through channels they set up, that could eventually lead to hiccups and delays in getting faxes to consumers.”
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