It will take 8-10 weeks of mitigation measures, not just a month, for the United States to come out on the other side of the spiraling novel coronavirus epidemic, former Obama administration official Dr. Zeke Emanuel said Wednesday.
"We went from a 15-day plan that President (Donald) Trump was waving around and now we have an additional 30-day plan," Emanuel told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "You saw Dr. (Anthony) Fauci say the next two weeks are going to be tough. I think we're still underplaying what is necessary."
Emanuel said that when he looks at the available data, including the University of Washington information that projects at least 100,000 people will die from the novel coronavirus, he believes it will take "really eight or 10 weeks of time" of mitigation efforts to come out on the other side of the pandemic.
"It will take you four weeks to get to the top that Tony Fauci has been saying," said Emanuel. "That is a lagging indicator. We have to see new cases go to zero. We have to see a plateau in the percentage of people who are positive, and then we can't ease off, we can't stop."
Trump said during his Tuesday press briefing that the "next two weeks" will be "tough," noted Emanuel, but Maryland and Washington, D.C., talked about having shelter-in-place orders until June 10, and "that's probably much more realistic."
Further, not all states have shelter-in-place orders, meaning that the nation isn't at "stage one" of what Trump wants, said Emanuel, adding that he hopes Trump will become convinced of the need for a national lockdown.
"Even with this very exuberant effort, we're still talking about 100,000 to 240,000 deaths and if we don't have an exuberant effort, it's going up to the hundreds of thousands, maybe even 2 million," said Emanuel. "That would be beyond horrid and tragic."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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