Local outbreaks of coronavirus could “quickly get out of control” if states with flare-ups fail to take the necessary steps to deal with the spread, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Monday during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Gottlieb said a vital procedure is aggressive contact tracing in which trained personnel interview infected individuals to pinpoint where they were infected and to track down others who might have been exposed.
“We’re not going to be able to shut down the country again this summer. We’re probably not going to be able to shut down the country again this fall,” Gottlieb said. "And so we’re going to need to try to isolate the sources of these outbreaks and take targeted steps. If we can’t do that, these will get out of control.”
Gottlieb stressed that, “We seem to be complacent, to some degree, with 20,000 cases a day [in the U.S.]. That’s an awful lot of infection. That’s why we’re seeing these flare-ups and these outbreaks. This is going to become the new norm - these kinds of sprawling outbreaks - if we continue to have this level of infection around the country.”
He added that the situation in current hot spots is unlikely to become as bad as the outbreak in New York due to more widespread testing, “but it has the potential to.”
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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