None of the states starting to reopen have met White House guidelines, researcher says
Here's some of the juicy quotes:
While more states lift stay-at-home restrictions, none have met all of the White House's guidelines on when they can safely start to reopen, a researcher from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said.
"To my knowledge, there are no states that meet all four of those criteria," said Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins.She described the four criteria at a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday:
"The first is to see the number of new cases decline for at least two weeks, and some states have met that criteria. But there are three other criteria and we suggest they should all be met," Rivers said.
Those include having "enough public health capacity to conduct contact tracing on all new cases, enough diagnostic testing to test everybody with Covid-like symptoms" and "enough health care system capacity to treat everyone safely."
"We have not scaled up the thousands and thousands of contact tracers that we need, we don't provide safe places for people to isolate or quarantine if they are identified as either having an infection or being in contact."
At most, 10% of the global population has been exposed to the virus, Balloux estimated.
Such a low percentage means the fight against coronavirus is far from over, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
He estimates the novel coronavirus has infected between 5% to 15% of the population and will continue to spread until about 60% to 70% are infected.
"Think how much pain, suffering, death and economic disruption we've had in getting from 5% to 15% of the population infected and hopefully protected," Osterholm said.
"Wake up, world. Do not believe the rhetoric that says this is going to go away."
