Doctors issue warnings on coming weeks, months for COVID-19

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Local doctors are issuing terrible warnings about the Covid-19 pandemic in the weeks and months to come in the United States, reminding the public and elected officials that action must be taken immediately to save lives.

“We are entering the most difficult days of the pandemic,” wrote Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health on Monday. “The next two months will see a lot of infections and deaths.”

This must be remembered with the emergence of “the light at the end of the tunnel,” the doctor wrote. On Monday, Pfizer announced that the first data on its COVID-19 vaccine suggests the vaccine may be 90 percent effective.

In his victory speech To the American public on Saturday evening, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he was forming a team of scientists and experts to materialize his plan to fight the pandemic and convert it into an “action plan” for the actions that he could undertake when he is in office. He unveiled the members of the advisory committee Monday.

But local public health experts and epidemiologists stress that action is needed before January 20, 2021 to save lives.

“The American people have decided they want a new approach to the pandemic, but we have 73 days before the new president takes office,” Jha wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “[Seventy-three] difficult days. Without action, [an] 100,000 more Americans will die on inauguration day. At least. We are therefore eager to act.

Infections are increasing rapidly in the United States, he noted. The percentage of tests that come back positive for the virus is also on the rise, indicating that many more infections are “missed”.

“The key is that we are unlikely to get much action from the Trump administration, so we have to look for leadership elsewhere,” Jha said.

The average number of new confirmed cases every day in the country is now over 100,000, but Jha said it is likely that the number of new infections per day is in fact between 300,000 and 400,000. The doctor said said he expected that by December the United States would see 2,000 deaths a day or more.

The situation is what experts have been warning about since April, according to Dr Michael Mina, a physician and assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard University.

“As serious as this has been, the hard truth is that we are only now getting into what will probably be the hardest part,” he said. written on twitter. “We had many opportunities to turn things around before the crash. We unfortunately wasted them all. Now we still have options, but it will take real strategy and real leadership. I just hope we can start tackling this virus with good policy today. No time like [the] present. “

Mina estimated that the United States could see 200,000 new confirmed cases a day before Thanksgiving.

“We have a new elected president who is driven by science and reason and who will act quickly,” the epidemiologist wrote. “But I’m worried about the difficult months before and the first to get there.”

Jha suggested there were five immediate steps to take: urge the Trump administration to ‘do more’, push Congress to fund tests for states, step up state testing, wear masks, and stop rallies. indoors.

“We can do a lot now,” he said. “All of us: Congress, governors, mayors, us as individuals.”

Read Jha’s full thread below:

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