Public health expert on coronavirus: 'We're well past containment at this point'
There are over 3.6 million cases of coronavirus around the world, and the U.S. accounts for roughly one third of them. Public health officials had hoped to keep the number of cases from growing in the country, but not all measures have been successful.
“We’re well past containment at this point,” Dr. Brian Garibaldi, medical director at Johns Hopkins’ Biocontainment Unit, said recently on Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker (video above). “We’re really at mitigation, and the only way we’re going to get this back under containment is the ability to identify hotspots of transmission and the ability to trace patients. But it’s really hard to do that if you still have over 1,000 cases per day in a certain area.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last month that if the U.S. had started mitigation earlier, it could have saved lives. The president had implemented stay-at-home measures in the middle of March, although the virus had shown signs of spreading a month earlier.
“I think we’re at a critical point,” Garibaldi said. “Some states are starting to slow down the rates of infection. Others are still seeing rises every day in both the numbers of new infections but also in death rates.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/public-health-expert-on-coronavirus-223134882.html