Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, after penning a widely-circulated opinion piece calling for the United States to "act big" now in order to avoid Italy's fate, said Monday there is still "every chance" to fight back.
“This is a perfect moment for preventive care,” he told Fox News' "Fox and Friends," while commenting on his Newsweek article.
“If we get ahead of this if we take the right precautions … if you’re careful about who you’re with, I think that we have every chance to be closer to South Korea and to have learned a painful lesson from Italy.”
Gingrich is in Italy with his wife, Calista, the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, and on Monday praised the country's "strong response" of closing schools and more after its initial slow response to the virus.
"When the first wave hit the villages, I don’t think anybody thought they would spread as fast as they did, so, that was a challenge," he said. "The (Italian) government’s now reacted very strongly.”
Italians are also "more disciplined" than at any point "since the Roman Empire," Gingrich said.
"You stand outside a store at a physical distance from each other, waiting for your turn to go in the store," he said. "Their stores are not empty. They are fully loaded, they have none of these problems of empty shelves. They’ve done a very disciplined, good job of that.”
Gingrich also called on Americans to keep apart physically, but to keep up their morale and remain social, "in an electronic sense, not personally."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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