The US surgeon general says that Americans should brace for levels of tragedy reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, while the nation’s infectious disease chief warned that the new coronavirus might never be completely eradicated from the globe.
Those were some of the most grim assessments yet for the immediate future and beyond, but hours later, US President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence tried to strike more optimistic tones, suggesting that hard weeks ahead could mean beginning to turn a corner.
“We’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel,” Trump said at a Sunday evening White House briefing.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Pence added: “We are beginning to see glimmers of progress.”
Trump also insisted that both assessments from his administration — they came within 12 hours of each other — did not represent an about-face or were even “that different.”
“I think we all know that we have to reach a certain point — and that point is going to be a horrific point in terms of death — but it’s also a point at which things are going to start changing,” Trump said. “We’re getting very close to that level right now.”
Earlier on Sunday, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CNN: “This is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly.”
“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized,” Adams said. “It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”
The number of people infected in the US has exceeded 337,600, with the death toll passing 9,600.
Also on Sunday, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said the toll in the coming week is “going to be shocking to some, but that’s what is going to happen before it turns around, so just buckle down.”
Fauci said the virus probably would not be wiped out entirely this year, and that unless the world gets it under control, it will “assume a seasonal nature.”
“We need to be prepared that, since it unlikely will be completely eradicated from the planet, that as we get into next season, we may see the beginning of a resurgence,” Fauci said. “That’s the reason why we’re pushing so hard in getting our preparedness much better than it was.”
He also repeated that there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and lupus that Trump has been touting as a possible remedy, works against the virus.
“In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation. “The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”
James Phillips, a professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University Hospital, said Americans could be risking their health if they followed Trump’s advice to take the drug.
“We don’t know enough to make medical recommendations,” he told CNN’s Reliable Sources. “It’s a dangerous message for someone without a medical license to get up there and tell people to try it. You need to listen to physicians, people who understand science, before you go willy-nilly into the medicine cabinet.”
Additional reporting by The Guardian
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