Trump’s former homeland security adviser warns that coronavirus could become a ‘fire out of control’

According to data from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, the coronavirus epidemic had killed at least 4,088 people worldwide as of Tuesday morning, March 10 — including over 3,000 in Mainland China, 463 in Italy, 291 in Iran, 54 in South Korea and 23 in the United States. Health officials fear that the situation in the U.S. could become much worse. And in an op-ed for the Washington Post, Tom Bossert (who served as a homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump in 2017 and 2018) warns that the U.S. needs to take very aggressive steps to make sure that coronavirus doesn’t get out of control.

“The near-term objective should be to reduce the acute, exponential growth of the outbreak in order to reduce suffering and the strain on our health-care system,” Bossert explains. “That will require significant effort, but it can work, as we have seen: Hong Kong and Singapore have achieved linear growth of covid-19 cases, staving off the terrifying exponential upward curve confronting Italy and pushing both the infection rate down and new cases out on the timeline. The United States needs to take note.”

Bossert stresses that not nearly enough coronavirus testing is taking place in the U.S. Continue reading.