The Pandemic Response That A Public Health Expert Wants, And The One He Got (NPR)

Jeremy Konyndyk speaks to NPR's All Things Considered about COVID-19. Read the full transcript, or listen here.

Excerpt:

"I think there are three major things that we need to be doing in this country. The first is protecting our health system. When we saw what was happening in Wuhan in mid-January to the hospitals there, the way they were overwhelmed by a surge of cases, that was the warning sign of what could happen, and we're seeing it now play out in northern Italy. We may be only a week or two from that beginning to play out in U.S. cities...

So the other two relate to relieving that burden on the hospitals. So the first is focusing like a laser on protecting the high-risk populations in this country. We know that this disease is most severe among the elderly and people with medical complications. It's not an accident that one of the worst outbreaks that we've seen in this country was at a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash. That is a warning to the rest of the country. We need to be on top of that everywhere else and making sure that nursing homes have the infection control that they need and the sanitation support that they need so that diseases don't spread there."