Public health expert’s warning: U.S. on course to hit 100,000 daily COVID-19 infections
The United States will “in the coming weeks” start to record 100,000 new COVID-19 infections every single day, public health expert Ashish Jha warned Tuesday.
“We’re rising quickly,” the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
“If we just go back about six, seven weeks ago to Labor Day we were at about 35,000 cases a day,” Jha noted. “We’re above 70,000 and just heading up. So, I would not be surprised if we end up getting to 100,000.”
Jha said hitting the grim landmark figure could be avoided “if we do some prudent things” aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, such as social distancing and wearing masks.
“But it doesn’t feel like there’s just enough policy impetus to act as we need to,” he added. “And so I’m worried we’re going to hit 100,000 in a day at some point in the coming weeks,” he added.
Blitzer agreed. “We need some national leadership to tell people you got to wear masks and we’re not getting that national leadership right now,” he said.
President Donald Trump intentionally misled the public at the start of the pandemic by downplaying the risk of the virus, while in private he acknowledged its threat. He has sent mixed messages on the need to wear masks and has held multiple campaign rallies for mainly maskless crowds since his three-day hospitalization for coronavirus treatment earlier this month.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday that the U.S. is “not going to control” the pandemic, but instead would “control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.”
More than 226,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19 ― close to around 1,000 every day. It has sickened upwards of 8.7 million people nationwide.
Check out the interview here:
“It is a total failure of our political leadership that we still don’t have testing fixed, we still don’t have the kind of therapeutics widely available,” Dr. Ashish Jha says. “That’s why we’re left with the social distancing and mask wearing.” pic.twitter.com/Fynx20mRQG
— CNN (@CNN) October 28, 2020
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