Within 24 hours the World Health Organization made and then pulled back a critically important statement regarding the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 global pandemic. According to Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s leading scientific voice on COVID-19, “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare.”
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.
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.
Today’s children are the pandemic generation. For millions, the future is now grim.
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.
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.
Coronavirus Update: CDC Goes Dark As California Reports First Possible Case Of Community Spread
The White House is clamping down on communication issued from government health officials and scientists about the spread of coronavirus following a decision by President Trump to put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the U.S. task force addressing the public health threat, according to a report in the New York Times. On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notably failed to hold a telephone press briefing despite the fact that California has reported a confirmed case where the infected person who did not have any exposure to someone known to have the virus and who did not travel to any of the countries where there has been an outbreak.
How much should we worry about the new coronavirus?
Just in the last few days, as the World Health Organization declared a Global Health Emergency and a similar Public Health Emergency declaration was made in the U.S., there has been growing evidence of possible person to person transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus, and it is increasingly likely that people can be contagious even before the appearance of symptoms. So, it should come as no surprise that public concerns about this new public health threat are also on the rise. Still, many questions remain unanswered and unanswerable at the moment.
In California there's an opportunity to lead the nation in building resilience
The scourge of wildfires yet again in California has the hallmarks of recurrent disaster nightmare for America’s most populous state. Last year’s fire season — in which the Camp Fire took more than 80 lives in the devastated town of Paradise alone — may have been the first glimpse into a future of almost dystopian threats to communities throughout the state, and the nation. However, from understanding the complexity of the causes of these events, there is an opportunity to re-write the way California approaches wildfires. In doing so, they can also provide a much needed roadmap for resilience for the rest of the nation.