Harvard expert says U.S. would have a “different situation” had there been earlier testing and lockdowns

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• The director of the Harvard Global Health Institute said that if the proper lockdowns and testing had been done earlier for coronavirus, the situation would have been different.
• He also said testing for the disease is “still a problem in many states.”
• Trump has defended that testing in the U.S. is “very much on par” with other countries.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the outbreak of coronavirus in the U.S. has killed 4,090 people and infected over 189,700, as of this writing. On Wednesday, Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute said that the situation in the United States would have been “clearly different if the proper steps had been taken.”

Jha praised the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a physician leading the coronavirus task force’s response, Deborah Birx. During Jha’s appearance on CNN’s “New Day”, he said that he had “no interest in contradicting them.”

He continues to say, “But I don’t know any public health expert who does not believe that if we had gotten our testing together, if we had gotten our hospitals ready, if we had communicated and gotten our lockdown orders going much earlier, we would have had a different situation.”

He also commented on the struggle to get testing saying it’s “still a problem in many states.” The director said that he’s not convinced that states that seem to have a low number of cases don’t really have a lot of cases.

“They just aren’t testing people and if you aren’t testing people, you are not going to be finding cases.”

U.S. governors and public health officials have said that testing in the US has a per capita that is struggling to keep up with other nation’s testing rates.

President Trump argues that testing in the U.S. is “very much on par” with other countries. With critics saying they didn’t act fast enough against the coronavirus outbreak, the administration continues to blame China, saying the country should have been more transparent about the disease.

Source: The HILL