Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the country is reaching a plateau in cases nationwide, but our country is still in the early stages of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The country is still adding more than 20,000 cases a day.
Dr. Inglesby was a guest on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace on Sunday, May 10.
He said “We’re not diagnosing enough cases and we’re not tracing their contacts. We don’t know how this disease is spreading in many places. We still don’t understand who’s at highest risk, why are we having so many cases this many weeks into a plateau. I am concerned. There are some places with low overall numbers and have had a two week decline in places, or more, that have been doing a lot of testing. There are places experiencing rising cases, too little testing, too little tracing.”
Inglesby said as businesses reopen, the number of cases will increase, and he’s concerned about the pressure on healthcare systems.
“Two months ago in this country, we had 750 cases. Now we have well more than a million. This disease moves quickly and doesn’t respect city borders, state borders. This is a really nasty virus. We have to do all we can to wear a cloth mask, maintain space.”
On Friday, May 8, President Donald Trump said COVID-19 will go away without a vaccine. Inglesby said the virus will not go away and will be a background problem until there is a vaccine. He said almost everybody in the country is susceptible to it, with a relatively small percentage of the population having been infected.
As of Sunday, May 10, a little over 1.3 million people in the U.S. are confirmed to have COVID-19, out of a population of around 331 million.
The Harvard Global Health Institute says Hawaii is one of only 9 states doing adequate testing. Johns Hopkins University places Hawaii at No. 23 in the amount of testing per 100,000 people. Almost all public health experts are advocating for more testing.
Hawaii’s case count now is at 632, and the increase in cases has been in the low single digits for more than 2 weeks.
