Coronavirus Testing Improving This Week: Gottlieb
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the U.S. will be in good shape for coronavirus testing by the end of the week. “Well, I think we're going to see a dramatic increase in diagnostic capability this week,” he said 3/15 on CBS’s Face the Nation. “So I think by the end of the week, tests are going to be readily available,” he said. “They approved tests on what we call high throughput systems, meaning systems that can run literally tens of thousands of tests a day inside academic labs or the large clinical labs like LabCorp and Quest. Once those facilities have those systems online, they're going to be able to process an awful lot of tests, and they'll have them online at some point this week. So by Friday, I think tests- testing is going to be pretty ubiquitous.”
Gottlieb warned that the U.S. is at risk of having a Wuhan, China-style outbreak that could overwhelm the hospital systems at several large cities. “Remember, Wuhan was the size of New York City,” he explained. “At the peak of that epidemic, they hospitalized about 20,000 people. Ten thousand were in serious or critical condition and 2,000 were intubated... So they need to be building surge capacity right now in anticipation of that possibility. Now, there's ways to avert it, but that's the risk that we face right now.”
With China, officials were able to confine the coronavirus to Wuhan, Gottlieb said. Because the U.S. has a much more mobile population, there are already multiple cities that are “seeded” with coronavirus, he said, with some estimates putting infection cases at up to 40,000 currently across the U.S. Worst case scenario is that the U.S. will have multiple Wuhans, he said.
Steps the U.S. has taken thus far have helped slow the outbreak, but more needs to be done, Gottlieb told host Margaret Brennan. “ I don't think we can quarantine a U.S. city and lock it down and deny people their liberty in this country,” he said. “I think what we can do is slow economic activity to a point where people have no place to go. If you close the theaters and you close the restaurants, you close large gatherings, you tell people not to have dinner parties, you tell businesses to have nonessential workers telework, people stay home. There's no place to go. I think that's the solution in the United States not to... not to put a city on lockdown. I don't think we're going to get there. We might. I hope not.”
Asked whether the White House has been listening to his dire warnings, Gottlieb told Brennan that he has been “fortunate” to have had the opportunity to talk to top government officials all through this. “Some of the calls that I was making and the conversations I was having go back to January,” he said. “I've been talking to White House staff and the staff has been concerned about this. And so I'm going to continue to try to provide whatever help I can.”