Coronavirus pandemic is ‘near the end of the beginning’ in the US, health expert says
The United States is nearing the end of the COVID-19 pandemic’s beginning, according to one health expert, but the number of new cases is still high.
Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in an interview on FOX News on Sunday that the United States is “near the end of the beginning” of the coronavirus pandemic.
He told FOX News that the country has “reached a plateau nationally.”
“Trends can change over time, but at this point we have a plateau in new cases per day,” he said in the interview. “Unfortunately it’s a very high plateau.”
Inglesby said the country is still seeing about 30,000 confirmed new cases and 2,000 deaths reported per day.
About 956,000 cases of the virus and 54,000 deaths have been reported in the United States as of Sunday afternoon, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“We are not out of the woods by any means in terms of the pandemic, but at least we’ve reached kind of a stable number of new infections and the number of people who are dying from this illness,” he said.
His comments come as leaders debate whether and when to start reopening the country and states.
Some states have plans to, or have started to, roll back restrictions in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus and to reopen their economies, while other leaders have said reopening isn’t safe yet.
President Donald Trump has also been eager to reopen the country in the near future.
Last week, Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview with FOX News that he thinks the coronavirus pandemic will be “behind us” by Memorial Day weekend.
But Inglesby in the interview Sunday said that isn’t likely.
He said numbers are still rising day by day in about half of the country, and in only a minority of the country are they going down.
“I don’t think it’s likely that we will at that position by Memorial Day but even more importantly, wherever we are in the epidemic, this virus is going to be with us until we have a vaccine,” he said. “So as we ease up on social distancing measures and economies begin to very carefully reopen, we are at risk of recurrence or re-spikes in illnesses.”
In response to Pence’s comments, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that social distancing will be “with us through the summer.”
Inglesby told FOX it’s impossible at this point to say that something is completely safe when asked about businesses such as salons and gyms reopening.
“Some things are safer than others, and businesses that have small numbers of people are probably safer than businesses that have very large numbers of people and the closeness of the interaction, that also is a factor,” he said in the interview.
He also said testing isn’t where it needs to be in the country in terms of mild illnesses.
“We’re missing a lot of illness in the country,” he told FOX. “Until we get that under control, we’re going to continue to have lines of transmission we can’t see.”
