One of the nation’s top public health experts is warning that if President Donald Trump does as expected and prematurely lifts the government restrictions in place to control the spread of coronavirus, it could lead to the deaths of millions of Americans.
In a series of tweets he posted Monday, Tom Inglesby, the director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, noted that Trump’s insistence that he’s “not going to let the cure be worse than the problem” has serious and damaging implications:
To drop all these measures now would be to accept that COVID pts will get sick in extraordinary numbers all over the country, far beyond
what the US health care system could bear. 11/x— Tom Inglesby (@T_Inglesby) March 23, 2020
Many models report that health care systems will be completely overwhelmed/collapse by the peak of cases if major social distancing is not put in place. 12/x
— Tom Inglesby (@T_Inglesby) March 23, 2020
As HuffPost notes, Inglesby also warns that U.S. hospitals would be overwhelmed if Trump tries to return everything to his vision of “normal” just to avoid an economic downturn:
“In the U.S., there have been over 46,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and at least 590 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. A week ago, there were just 5,000 or so confirmed cases in the country.
“’Some hospitals have said publicly that within a week they will not have ventilators to treat everyone with COVID anymore,’ Inglesby tweeted. ‘There continue to be big diagnostic limitations. … There continues to be terrible shortages in the masks that health care workers need to keep from getting sick with this disease.'”
So if, as expected, the president tells us all to go about our business the way it was before COVID-19 appeared in the U.S., that doesn’t mean the coast is clear and the danger has dissipated. It’ll only mean that he’s decided his reelection is more important than your life.
Featured Image Via NBC News
