Tom Inglesby, director of the Bloomberg School Health Safety Center, spoke during a brief briefing on the development of Covid-19 on Capitol Hill in Washington, on March 6. Samuel Corum / Getty Images
The corona virus pandemic kills an average of 1,000 Americans a day and 4,000 worldwide, and this should not be the new normal, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Bloomberg School Health Safety Center, at a press conference Thursday.
“We can do better than this,” Inglesby said. “I’m afraid people have accepted where we are as a new normal and it’s not normal.”
Some countries have hundreds or even thousands of new Covid-19 cases every day and Inglesby shows that countries like New Zealand and Thailand have pushed their cases to zero.
“Are we resigning to losing 1,000 Americans a day, until we have a vaccine?” He asked. “I hope we don’t do it.”
Around the world: The tactic used by New Zealand, Thailand and other countries to drive the number of cases of their corona virus is the same general practice carried out by public health officials in the United States for months: border control, extensive testing, rapid isolation, tracking, quarantine, fussy hygiene, intensive physical distance, closure of schools and workplaces and coordinated public health strategies, Inglesby said.
“We can do these things in the US and we should,” Inglesby added.
He referred to a study this week from the University of California at Berkeley that found that orders at home alone had prevented more than 62 million corona virus infections in the US so far and 530 million in the six other countries studied.
“Social distance work,” he said, noting that in some places across the country people were letting their defenses down, moving “too fast to open up the economy at the risk of accelerating the spread of disease.”
He also warned that he considered indoor meetings as one of the ongoing dangers to catching and spreading the virus.
“I think things that will be a higher risk are longer periods of time indoors with other people who are not part of your family and you breathe in the air they exhale. If you are at close range, it will pose a risk higher, “he said.
Moving forward during a pandemic: Inglesby also expressed concern about reopening the school. There is no information about whether children spread the disease in school. They clearly do not have the same level of severe illness as adults, he said.
“The concern is that we do not know whether children at school will accelerate the spread in these institutions and then transmit the disease to older teachers or administrators, or to families, parents, grandparents at home,” he said. .
