NEW: Obama’s Ebola Czar says coronavirus infections will “explode” in the next two weeks, won’t decrease until May
“We’re really at the inflection point here, where this disease is really going to explode in the U.S.,” Klain said in an interview with Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast. While the number of confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases is already doubling every three days, Klain said, he expects new cases to “accelerate further as we finally start to put some testing on the line and we start to really understand how big a problem we have — and I think it’s a very big problem.
“Particularly right now, at the end of flu season, things like ventilators, respirators, emergency room beds, care for respiratory patients — it’s already straining the system, and then you add hundreds of thousands of intensely ill patients to that and we’re going to see dire consequences in our hospitals,” Klain said. “We’re going to see that in terms of hospitals running out of beds to treat patients.
“There’s a hospital in Philadelphia that this week shut down its labor and delivery ward because all the labor and delivery nurses had coronavirus,” Klain said. “We’re going to see this as health care workers get sick, as hospitals get filled — it’s going to have an impact on all aspects of our health care delivery in the United States.”
Klain also said it is much too late to contain the virus in the U.S. because very few people could be tested in January and February, when it was already spreading. “Hopes of isolating it seem very remote,” Klain said. “We still have major states where they don’t have the test supplies. ... That means that people aren’t getting tested, and when they’re getting tested they’re waiting days, literally days, to get results.
“To date, the Trump administration has taken a laissez-faire approach to the supply chain,” Klain said. “President Trump told governors basically, ‘Hey, go out there and find supplies as you can,’ as opposed to working with the private sector and the big producers to route the supplies to the places where they’re needed the most.”
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