Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday that Georgia may be opening up too soon and consequently upping the risk of infection for the rest of the country.
“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked, “Parts of the country are opening up, Georgia is getting a lot of attention for how much they’ve opened up and so quickly. What does that do to the rest of the country? Does it up the risk of infection?”
Gottlieb replied that it “does up the risk of infection” and that Georgia is “certainly not out of the woods.”
He elaborated, saying, “They’re only testing about 1% of their total population. They have 23,000 cases. They may have plateaued in their epidemic, but they’re accruing new cases. And they’re not coming down in the terms of the number of cases. The slope up in terms of cases that got us to the point of this epidemic was a rapid slope, a rapid progression. The slope down is going to be far more gradual.”
He then compared America’s infection rate to China and Italy, saying that America’s coronavirus decline is more likely to look similar to Italy’s.
“In China, the slope down was symmetric with the slope up. In Italy, they rapidly grew the number of cases, and they’re very slowly coming down. We’re likely to look a lot more like Italy. It will take some time until we see sustained decline in cases and get to the point where there is a low enough spread in the country that we can feel comfortable about opening up parts of the country.”
Georgia, on Friday, began to relax their social distancing restrictions as Republican Gov. Brian Kemp allowed certain businesses to reopen.
Gottlieb has authored a detailed plan to reopen the country that involves extensive testing and comprehensive contact tracing. (RELATED: This Former Trump Official Has A Detailed Plan To Reopen The Economy And Get People Back To Work)