We're in shutdown mode for now, but what comes next? Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is working on a plan to safely reopen the country.
. Redfield said that now, testing capacity is increasing daily and that he's encouraged to see that point-of-care tests that give results within minutes are starting to enter the market.
Next, Redfield said, America will need to scale up capacity for tracing the contacts of those who test positive."It is going to be critical," he said."We can't afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission — so it is going to be very aggressive, what I call 'block and tackle,' 'block and tackle.'"Given how laborious contact tracing is, that means bringing on a lot more people to do that work.
Redfield said it would be"premature" for him to specify how exactly the CDC will do this and how much staffing it plans to put in place. But he said an announcement will come in the near future."Obviously, if we're going to try to get this nation back to work shortly after the end of this month, we're far along in those planning processes as we speak," he said.
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