Former FDA commissioner warns of new fall epidemic amid 'persistent spread'

Source: Politico

By SARAH CAMMARATA
05/03/2020 12:25 PM EDT

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned on Sunday that if states allow schools, workplaces and other public areas to “let their guard down," an explosion of new coronavirus cases could bubble up into a “new epidemic” or “large outbreak.”

“The concerning thing here is that we’re looking at the prospect that this may be a persistent spread,” Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected. We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point, and we’re just not seeing that,” Gottlieb said, in response to a question about the pandemic’s future course.

Gottlieb, who served early in the Trump administration, said the “doubling time has come down dramatically,” — the number of days it takes for the epidemic to double in size. But he warned, “We may be facing the prospect that 20,000, 30,000 new cases a day diagnosed becomes a new normal and a thousand or more deaths becomes a new normal as well.”

That type of scenario may continue “through the summer,” he said, when people start to “[let] their guard down a little more, and people are back at work after an August recess, and then you can see this slow simmer explode into a new epidemic, or a large outbreak."

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/03/gottlieb-fda-fall-coronavirus-231757