From the desk of Dr. Gupta Tuesday 06.23.20
I recently had the chance to talk to Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who was an adviser to President Barack Obama. We talked about what he would say to President Trump if he had the chance. What he said was really interesting, in part because he told me he did advise President Trump toward the end of February.
Here’s a bit of what Dr. Emanuel told me: “I did say to the President that you've got to do what Lyndon Johnson would have done or Franklin Roosevelt would have done -- is you create a tornado of activity. So you've got a task force that deals with testing, a task force that deals with PPE, and a task force that deals with ventilators and contact tracing. And they created a small task force that was supposed to do all of that. That was totally inadequate, and I think it would have made a huge difference.” What Dr. Emanuel made clear was the feeling this administration came nowhere close to understanding the scope of the challenge.
What that means is we’re now in a place we shouldn’t be. For example, if you look at South Korea, they never went into a lockdown phase. Yet fewer than 300 people died there. Why is that? Because they did exactly what Emanuel talked about: They brought in a biotech company to figure out the best way to test and contract trace, and they took the virus seriously.
In the United States, we’re now faced with the challenge of having to play catch-up, with the hope that we can somehow stem the number of cases and keep the death toll from climbing as best we can. *******
------------- 'A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.' --Confucius
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