Every state in the country has begun reopening its economy, as over 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began. Health officials are keeping a concerned eye on states — such as Arizona, Utah and Kentucky — where the percentage of positive cases is increasing.
“I think that the states are going to shift around over the course of the summer, which states are hot, which states are cooling down, but my concern is that we don’t really get below very persistent and rather high level of infection across the country,” Trump’s former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, said on CNBC earlier this week.
The measures needed now are “much more surgical” than the stay-at-home orders necessary in the first few months to try to get the virus under control, said Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
This includes robust contact tracing, key to curbing the spread of the virus in the coming months, and re-envisioning what communal settings look like, such as nursing homes and work sites where people are close together, like meatpacking plants.
Meanwhile, other health experts, like former President Barack Obama’s CDC director, argue that the number of cases isn’t an adequate metric for assessing the pandemic.
“‘Tracking the number of cases tells us very little. Tracking the number of tests tells us very little,” said Tom Frieden, who advocated instead for analyzing metrics like the cases from quarantined contacts, the number of infections per week among local health care workers and the proportion of cases that are not linked to other known patients.
Source: politico.com
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