US states must do more to reduce coronavirus infection rates, but now they have fewer tools to work with, Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Institute of Global Health, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday. in The Situation Room.
“They must become aggressive if they are going to control these virus outbreaks or if they are going to be forced to shut down, and I think no one wants that right now,” Jha said.
Unfortunately, aggressive action has been politicized, Jha said. “Here we are in the largest pandemic in a century: 120,000 Americans dead, and what we must do to prevent this from spiraling out of control is to wear a mask, maintain social distance, and wash our hands,” he said. “Instead of politicizing them, I would like to see our leaders, really duplicate those scientific areas of advice, so that we can keep Americans safe.”
There is some good news, Jha said. “We are not seeing the level of death that we saw a couple of months ago, and that is a relief. We have improved in the treatment of this disease, and that is a relief. And we have better evidence to see these cases, “he said.
“But the downside is that we don’t have the ability to close, or we don’t really. We have already used it. And the political space necessary to close the whole country again, I think, is really limited, “he added.
“If we don’t act aggressively now, and we just leave this for a little bit longer, then we can get into that ‘apocalyptic situation.'” I think we all want to avoid it, and we can do it, but we have to move fast and we have to move aggressively. ”
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, has characterized the models for certain metropolitan areas, such as Houston, as “about to be apocalyptic.”
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