The CDC should have updated its surface cleaning guidelines much earlier, says Dr. Ashish Jha.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should have updated their guidelines on cleaning household surfaces well before this week, the dean of the Brown University school of public health said Tuesday.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Dr. Ashish Jha told CNBC “The News with Shepard Smith”. “I think I was starting to say last April and May, a lot of us in public health, let’s stop wiping surfaces.”

“I don’t understand, actually, what took the CDC so long to be really clear about this. This virus spreads through the air,” Jha said.

The CDC said on Monday that a careful scrub with soap and water was enough to prevent Covid-19 from spreading around the house. However, the use of disinfectants is recommended in schools and indoor homes where there has been a suspected or confirmed case of the virus within 24 hours.

“In most situations, regular cleaning of surfaces with soap and detergent, without necessarily disinfecting these surfaces, is sufficient to reduce the risk of the spread of COVID-19,” said CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. , during a White House briefing Monday.

Jha noted that the CDC’s public health messages were part of a larger pattern of poor government messages regarding Covid.

“I would say the first two months are confusing, but in April, May of last year, it was very clear that it’s in flight,” Jha said. “It has been frustrating that this has not always come out consistently from our federal officials.”

The CDC did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Host Shepard Smith also asked Jha about the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant after Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, warned on Sunday that the variant could infect children more easily than previous strains. .

Jha said he was “concerned” about the B.1.1.7 variant in children, mainly because they have not yet been vaccinated.

“We don’t see a lot of infections in older people because we get them vaccinated, and that really leaves young adults and children vulnerable to B.1.1.7,” Jha noted. “One of the reasons we can’t totally relax now is that we really need to reduce those infection numbers.”

Every state in the country has reported at least one case of variant B.1.1.7 that was first detected in the UK, according to CDC data. Walensky said on Wednesday that the variant is becoming the predominant Covid strain in many parts of the United States.