According to state health department data, there are currently 9,354 confirmed coronavirus infections in Oklahoma, up 5.1 percent from the previous day. “It’s likely that an event like this, at this particular moment, is going to be a super-spreader event,” Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University told The Daily Beast. Anthony Fauci, a leading infectious disease expert and key member of the White House coronavirus task force, confirmed that he would not attend, given the choice, citing his own high-risk demographic as a 79-year-old man.
How coronavirus has created a new split in American life
“People are seeing this as a personal decision, and it’s based on our own personal risk tolerance,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a professor of public health and pediatrics at Columbia University. “That’s not public health, because in public health, your risk should not be my risk.”
Could The Polio Vaccine Curb The Coronavirus Pandemic?
As a physician, my task is to keep people safe and as healthy as possible. Medicines, including vaccines, play a big role in this undertaking. However, almost equally dangerous as viral spread is the spread of false hope. To pacify expectations, I often turn to my public health colleague, Irwin Redlener, MD, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University: “Suggestions that oral polio vaccine may have a role in temporarily preventing Covid-19 are provocative, but not really supported by the kind of evidence that would make many of us optimistic.” Dr. Redlener was surprised by Dr. Fauci’s public support of OPV. “It’s far too early to suggest that OPV is some kind of miraculous, low-cost preventive measure,” added the professor of pediatrics.
Pro-Trump donors in huge cash drive to boost doctors pushing states to reopen
“The fact that these organizations have found doctors who are willing to support a rightwing agenda designed to help Donald Trump against all scientific evidence and appropriate public health practices is shameful,” said Irwin Redlener, a professor of public health at Columbia University.
Critics notwithstanding, Brandon said the coalition recently spent $50,000 for videos on Facebook, Hulu and Twitter targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.
Disaster season is upon us. The pandemic changes everything.
Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician, directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute at Columbia University; he is also a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and president emeritus of Children’s Health Fund.
It is already clear that 2020 be a year for the history books. The world has lurched from one mega-disaster to the next, witnessing devastating wildfires in Australia, plagues of locusts across East Africa and South Asia, and a pandemic that has crippled the global economy.
Aftershock: If coronavirus swells in a second wave later this year, will the nation be ready?
Don't open businesses until rapid reliable testing available everywhere
The U.S. is on the verge of a mass reopening of businesses in many states.
This mad rush, most notably led by Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp (R), is fraught with the danger of new, uncontrollable surges of COVID-19. If the reopening is not done properly, there could well be tens of thousands of potentially avoidable pandemic deaths throughout the nation.
A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign
The campaign has consulted physicians and health experts about safeguarding Mr. Biden, who at 77 falls squarely into a high-risk group for the coronavirus. Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said he had spoken with the campaign about health precautions, including how to handle the possibility that members of Mr. Biden’s traveling staff had been exposed.
“In terms of the safety of the staff, the candidate, what did they need to know?” said Dr. Redlener, who previously served on Mr. Biden’s public health advisory committee.
The COVID-19 Death Undercount Is Scarier Than You Think
As the number of coronavirus deaths across the U.S. passed 40,000, there were emerging signs of hope: hospitalization rates were decreasing, daily death tolls were beginning to flatten, and transmission rates were seeming to slow.
But as mayors and governors, with the president’s blusterous urging, begin easing restrictions and other emergency public health measures—sending Floridians back to packed beaches this weekend, for instance—we still need a better understanding of the true number of COVID-19 deaths. Not just because having a transparent and accurate death count is critical (it is), but because it can illuminate unknown hot spots and provide critical insight into the real scope of this pandemic—and how to avoid new disaster amid the urge to resume normal life.
Governors should ignore Trump's advice until widespread testing and effective contact tracing are ready
While acknowledging (finally) that re-opening the economy and lifting some of the social distancing restrictions is not really his decision, President Donald Trump gave US governors a clear message on Thursday: time to start getting the country back to normal within the next couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, we are far from being able to do so without risking a major resurgence of Covid-19.
Even if we assume that sometime this summer — maybe June, perhaps as late as August — the first wave of Covid-19 will have tapered down, the world will likely see a second wave of the deadly virus in the fall or winter, perhaps extending into the early months of 2021.
How the Coronavirus Has Infected Our Vocabulary
We rarely watch the television, but on this first weekday morning of an eerily quiet Austin, Texas, we decided to keep it on, a portal to the wider world. Dr. Irwin Redlener, from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said, on CNN, “We are so incredibly underprepared for a major onslaught to the hospitals, which is basically now inevitable.” Shortages of I.C.U. beds and ventilators.
Trump Said Coronavirus Would 'Miraculously' Be Gone By April. Well, It's April.
During an online COVID-19 briefing last week, Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, dismissed Trump’s Easter target.
“I just want to say on behalf of everyone I know in the business, that is literally out of the question,” Redlener said. “This cannot happen. It should not happen. We actually should be increasing the restrictions for some period of time.”
Democrats Postpone Convention, and a Test of Wills With Republicans Looms
Dr. Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said he was deeply skeptical of a summer convention.
“It is unreasonably optimistic to think that a traditional presidential political convention can happen in the summer of 2020, there’s so much we don’t understand about this,” said Dr. Redlener, who is also the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. He said that gathering large numbers of people together “is counter to every reasonable public health guideline during the pandemic.”
'We’re all stressed out': Parenting in a pandemic puts additional stress on families, children
Each night, Paula Madrid's 7-year-old daughter, Chloé, refuses to go to bed quietly -- a new rebellion hatched since the family sequestered themselves in their New York City apartment to avoid the coronavirus.
"Everyday, there's something going on that wasn't happening before," said Madrid, a clinical and forensic psychologist.
In normal times, Madrid would discipline Chloé and enforce the bedtime rule. But times are far from normal.
The Health 202: Joe Biden is likely to draw on Obama health experts if he wins the White House
Some of the task force members are scathing in their criticism of how Trump has handled the crisis. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disease Preparedness at Columbia University, said Trump “cannot be believed” on virtually anything he says about the pandemic. “He is a source of misinformation, creating havoc by the unreliability of what he says in general,” Redlener told me recently.
We must find ways to adapt to the changes
My wife Karen and I were at the Children’s Health Fund and National Center for Disaster Preparedness offices earlier last week. The place was surreal in its emptiness, much like the rest of the world and the “new normal.” We are settling into how we organize our lives in a strange, constantly changing environment.