These blog posts are a compilation of Irwin’s op-eds, publications, media interviews, and a variety of other features.
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.”
One expert, Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a public health analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, called the travel bans a “mixed bag" in terms of effectiveness.
Stopping travel from China was coupled with inconsistent messaging from the White House on the potential severity of the threat. On Jan. 30, Trump said the U.S. has "very little problem," and through February, Trump was comparing the coronavirus to a flu.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, an expert in disaster preparedness at Columbia University, was floored by Trump’s decision to re-open everything in a matter of weeks.“It is mind-bogglingly inappropriate to even think about that,” he told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle. “I think we have to understand that this is a really totally unprecedented crisis, really since 1918, we have not experienced anything like this.
During an appearance on the Brian Lehrer Show last week, Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, stressed that stores should be doing more to protect employees and avoid overcrowding. "We understand that people want to stock up in case there is a more serious quarantine," he said. But things like limiting the number of people allowed in a store at any one time was an "absolutely critically important thing that must be done."
