A former federal health official on Wednesday urged the public and leaders to do all they can right now to stem the coronavirus so that society can reopen gradually as quickly and as safely as possible.
Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said officials need to keep their eyes on the virus to understand its spread, strengthen health care systems to protect medical staff and care for the mildly and critically ill. They also must ramp up public health capacity in testing, turnaround time and contact tracing, he said.
People with mild illness should isolate themselves and those exposed to coronavirus who are not sick should self quarantine, he said. Dr. Frieden also proposed installing hand sanitizers at every building entrance and conducting temperature checks as extra precautions.
“How well and how quickly we do these things will determine how soon and how safely we can reopen. And when we return, we need to reopen the faucet gradually, not open the floodgates and risk an explosion of cases again,” Dr. Frieden, now the CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies, told reporters from his home in New York City.
“This is an emergency, and we need to act with that sense of urgency to ready our public health and health care systems for this serious COVID-19 wave that will inevitably be coming,” he said. “It’s a question of short-term economic pain for long-term economic and health gain … It’s not about when we can reopen but what we have to do now to make that day come sooner.”
In the U.S., the coronavirus has sickened nearly 200,000 people and killed more than 4,300 as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker.
More than 1,000 of those deaths come from New York, the outbreak epicenter in the States. Globally, the coronavirus has infected more than 900,000 and killed more than 45,000.
• Shen Wu Tan can be reached at stan@washingtontimes.com.
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