During an interview with CNBC on July 10, former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, said there is “so much infection around the country” that he believes is being undercounted.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb “We must have well over 700,000 infections a day, even though we’re only diagnosing about 60,000,” Gottlieb said. “Before, when we had come down, and we were sort of burning around 20,000 diagnosed infections a day, the conventional wisdom was the prevalence was 1 in 200 people. So, now, it must be higher than that.” That accounts for his current estimate of around 1 case for every 150 people. RELATED: For more up-to-date information, sign up for our daily newsletter. The lack of national unity is much to blame for the surging cases, Gottlieb said. He doesn’t think the country will adopt a unified plan at this point, which will in turn make it harder to contain the new surges—and this will be especially challenging for the Northeastern states that have already brought their infection levels down. Referencing the 14-day quarantines that states like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have implemented on travelers from hotspot states in the South, he called them “a patchwork of solutions” that he believes will progressively get more heavily and aggressively enforced. “Our borders are fairly porous,” Gottlieb said. “This is going to be a difficult task for the states that want to try to preserve the gains they made, paying a pretty big sacrifice to crush the virus, to have it not be reimported back into those states in meaningful numbers and see epidemics heading into the fall.” Earlier, on June 29, Gottlieb told CNBC that he estimates that nearly half the population will have the coronavirus by the end of the year. He said that the virus in the South is spreading faster than it can be contained, with “tens of thousands of infections” circulating in southern communities. However, one potential positive of half the population being infected is that Gottlieb believes fweer people will need to get vaccinated, as a result. Expecting a vaccine by early 2021, he believes it won’t be necessary “to vaccinate the entire population, because a lot of people will have already had this by the time we get to a vaccination.” And for more on where COVID is spreading, The 2 States Where Coronavirus Is Spreading Fastest Will Surprise You.
