The unrelenting strain on hospitals trying to cope with record numbers of people sickened with COVID-19 won’t begin to subside until the end of January, former Food and Drug Administrator Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday.
In a sobering interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Gottlieb said states on both coasts are dealing with the worst of the virus and warned that “we have a grim month ahead of us, a very difficult month ahead of us.”
“There are signs that the number of new daily cases are starting to plateau,” he said, but added, "even if we start to see a plateau of cases the first week of January, it will not be until the end of January where we start to see the burden on hospitals begin to lessen.”
“The cases are being led by the coasts, California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey. When you look at Illinois, Michigan, you're starting to see cases come down quite discernibly,” he said. “It is the East Coast and West Coast, and Florida where the cases are still building.”
According to Gottlieb, Florida recorded 17,000 COVID-19 cases on Dec. 26 and had around 21,000 deaths, “the fourth highest in the country” in terms of coronavirus deaths.
“Florida is dense, like California, and I think that's why they're experiencing a very difficult epidemic,” he said. “Florida is not out of the woods by a long shot.”
Gottlieb said he believes the COVID-19 variant recorded in Great Britain is already in the United States but just has not been picked up by testing here.
“We don't sequence a lot of samples in this country. A lot of that sequencing that does get done is done in private labs,” he noted.
“In the U.K., they're sequencing about 10% of all of the samples. Here we're doing a fraction of 1%. We probably need a better approach to more systemically sequence strains in the United States to track new variants in this virus. We're not doing that.”
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