Over the past few days, Dr. Tony Fauci, Robert Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Scott Gottlieb, former Commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have continued to warn that there can be no letup in the measures required to contain the coronavirus and protect the population, especially children.
In an interview with ABC on July 13, Dr. Fauci urged people to trust “respected medical authorities. I believe I’m one of them, so I think you can trust me.” In a presentation to Georgetown University students, yesterday, Fauci warned that the global coronavirus could be as bad as the 1918 flu pandemic, which he called “the mother of all pandemics.” He again urged young people to not be “part of the problem…. Don’t let yourself get infected and you don’t spread to anybody else,” he said.
Also speaking yesterday with the editor-in-chief of the American Medical Association, the CDC’s Dr. Redfield praised President Donald Trump for setting an example for the nation by wearing a mask last weekend, but added that he is extremely concerned about the fall and winter of 2020-2021, which he warned could be “one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health because of….the co-occurrence of COVID-19 and influenza.” There’s a possibility, he said, “that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.”
Referencing President Trump’s recent remarks that some European countries—Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—had opened their schools “with no problem,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb pointed out to CNBC that those countries (except for Sweden) actually brought down the coronavirus infection rate to a manageable degree before opening schools. And, he warned, understand that the incidence among American children of asthma, obesity, and diabetes is far higher than in their European counterparts. The existence of these comorbidities, therefore, means “there is going to be higher risk with our school-age population,” he said. The CDC warns that 18.5% of American children between ages of 2 and 19, suffer from obesity (13.7 million children); about 6 million children under age 18 have asthma, with black children suffering from asthma at twice the rate of white children; and 193,000 young people under age 20 have diabetes.
Gottlieb also stated, in a July 10 interview with CNBC, that he thinks that the U.S. today must have well over 700,000 COVID-19 infections a day — ten times what is currently being reported. Without going into details, he attributed this to vast underreporting of cases.
“It’s going to be hard to get to a point where you could — you’re not going to eliminate the infection — but get it down to levels that are much, much lower … the prevalence of actual infection in the country right now must be pretty high.” He lamented the lack of a single, coordinated strategy for the whole country.
