Negative outlook by longtime director of @NIH: “If you look at the rates of new cases that are being diagnosed, we’re on an exponential curve. That curve, some would say, places us only about eight days behind Italy....” #COVID19 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
2) “If true, we have only a very short time before this becomes a national crisis with many people and hospitals quickly becoming very stressed with the ability to handle all of these sick people, especially older people who may need not just bed but even a ventilator.” #COVID19
3) “There are estimates that if nothing goes right and if we fail to flatten the curve and if health systems are overwhelmed, we might see the 📍deaths of as many as a million and a half people📍 in the United States.”😰 #COVID19
4) “if you go back 8 days from today, they had about the same number of cases that we have today—that is, slightly over 2,000. And then if we follow that same track, then 8 days from [March 22], we would be having the same kind of incredible crisis that they are facing.” #COVID19
5) Collins added this important qualifier: “Now we have a chance to change that, by applying now the most draconian measures on social distancing to try to limit the spread of coronavirus from person to person. But we will not succeed at changing the course...” #COVID19
6) “...from that exponential curve unless there is full national engagement in those commitments to try to reduce spread. certainly in the last few days there seems to be a lot of waking up to just how serious the threat is, but that’s obviously not universal across” #COVID19
7) what has surprised Collins the most about the coronavirus from his perspective as a doctor and a scientist: “The degree to which this is so rapidly transmissible. More so than SARS was. SARS was a terribly scary situation for the world 18 years ago...” #COVID19
8) “... but it never reached the level of infections or deaths that we have for this, because it wasn’t as transmissible. SARS was transmissible but only from people who were very sick. #COVID19 seems transmissible from people who have minor illness or maybe no illness at all”
9) “...which is why it has been so difficult to get control or to know when you should be imposing these stringent measures we’ve been talking about. If you wait until you’ve seen lots of affected cases, you know you’ve waited too late” #COVID19
10) “because the number of people who haven’t yet turned up in the health-care system but who are already infected is probably 100 times the number of cases you know about.” ➡️ this highlights why we need to #TESTVIRUSNOW #COVID19
