President Trump and his administration administration are suddenly taking the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic very seriously.
Why?
Because a new report says the virus could kill more than 2 million Americans.
According to what the New York Times calls a “dire report” on the crisis, British researchers calculate that without swift action to slow the spread of the virus and suppress new infections, up to 2.2 million people in the United States could die, along with more than half a million in Britain.
Equally startling is that unprecedented restrictions might be imposed for up to a year and a half.
“To curb the epidemic,” the Times says, “there would need to be drastic restrictions on work, school and social gatherings for periods of time until a vaccine was available, which could take 18 months, according to the report.”
The report admits that “no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time.”
“How populations and societies will respond remains unclear,” it concludes.
The White House is asking Congress to approve an $850 billion economic stimulus package, including $50 billion to support the airline industry alone.
“The package would be mostly devoted to flooding the economy with cash, through a payroll tax cut or other mechanism,” reports the Washington Post.
The British researchers cautioned that the steps they recommend carry “enormous costs that could also affect people’s health” — but they conclude that such actions are “the only viable strategy at the current time” to mitigate the pandemic.
A running tally by the Post showed on Tuesday that there are now at least 4,661 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the U.S., and 89 Americans have died. Globally, there are well over 180,000 cases, with more than 7,000 deaths. All such numbers are climbing by the hour.
Trump unveiled restrictive new guidelines for fighting Covid-19 at a Monday news conference. Among other things, he urged Americans to avoid groups of more than 10 people and to stay out of bars and restaurants. He followed up with reporters at the White House Tuesday.
At the Monday news conference, Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader of a White House task force on the pandemic, said the British researchers found that “social distancing, small groups, not going in public in large groups” had the “biggest impact” against the spread of the virus.
“The most important thing was if one person in the household became infected, the whole household self-quarantined for 14 days,” Birx said. Such action, she said, “stops 100% of the transmission outside of the household.”
The British report was made public on Monday, but the White House task force learned of its basic findings a week ago and received a full copy over the weekend.
The lead author of the study by researchers at Imperial College London, Neil Ferguson, told the Times that his group also “shared its fatality estimates” with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), including an estimate that “eight to nine percent of people in the most vulnerable age group, 80 and older, could die if infected.”
Ferguson said the potential health impacts would be “comparable to the devastating 1918 influenza outbreak, and would ‘kind of overwhelm health system capacity in any developed country, including the United States,’ unless measures to reduce the spread of the virus were taken,” the Times says.
