A top pandemic expert warns it's way too soon to end the coronavirus lockdowns: 'COVID would spread widely, rapidly, terribly'

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A top pandemic expert warns it's way too soon to end the coronavirus lockdowns: 'COVID would spread widely, rapidly, terribly'
Johns Hopkins' Tom Inglesby addresses Congress

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

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Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, speaks during a briefing on the developments of the novel coronavirus on Capitol Hill on March 6, 2020 in Washington, DC.

  • Tom Inglesby, a director of health security at Johns Hopkins University, says it's far too early to start pulling back social distancing efforts without risking millions of US lives.
  • That's after President Donald Trump said the economy needs to get going again at a White House coronavirus briefing on Monday.
  • Before a change of course, the US needs to come up with more gear and reduce the overall caseload, Inglesby said.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

US President Donald Trump is calling for the economy to "get open," and others are pushing for a resumption of economic activity as well.

But one top pandemic expert is warning that a premature end to social distancing and lockdowns has the potential to let the novel coronavirus spread more widely, potentially resulting in millions of deaths.

"Anyone advising the end of social distancing now, needs to fully understand what the country will look like if we do that," Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a thread on Twitter.

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"COVID would spread widely, rapidly, terribly, could kill potentially millions" in the next year "with huge social and economic impact across the country," he continued.

The novel coronavirus has been spreading quickly in the US. Meanwhile, hospitals are experiencing shortages in tests, swabs, ventilators, and protective equipment for hospital workers. Some models predict that healthcare systems will be completely overwhelmed by the peak of cases if major social distancing is not put in place, Inglesby said.

In Monday's briefing from the White House coronavirus task force, Trump told reporters that "we're going to be opening our country up for business because our country was meant to be open and working with others."

"And we're going to get it all going again very soon, hopefully very, very soon," Trump said.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the task force coordinator, added that responses to the pandemic need to be tailored geographically and implemented over time.

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The president continued: "But at the same time, at a certain point, we have to get open and we have to get moving," he said. "We don't want to lose these companies. We don't want to lose these workers."

The comments came less than 24 hours after Fox News host Steve Hilton said on Sunday that the economic impacts of social distancing would do more harm to Americans than the virus itself.

Inglesby, who gave Congress a series of recommendations on March 4 to prepare for widespread outbreaks, said that the US has a long list of to-do items before considering big changes to social distancing measures.

It includes creating an "extraordinary quantity" of masks and other protective gear so that shortages are no longer possible; increasing capacity to provide medical care; reducing cases such that tracing and isolation is possible again; implementing screening at airports; and figuring out who's infected and recovered already.

"Once we have those things in place, it would be a far less risky time to take stock of social distancing measures in place and consider what might gradually be reduced with trial and error," Inglesby said.

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