The U.S. should draw lessons from Wuhan and start aggressive testing of COVID-19 at scale through out the country to wipe out new infections, said a Nobel Prize Laurette in a recent interview.
Michael Romer, the co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences urged the U.S. to follow China’s footsteps, including citywide testing and lockdowns,which will be a critical turning point in curbing the COVID-19 epidemic in the country.
Wuhan, as the Chinese city worst hit by the epidemic, once saw its number of cases surge above 80,000. But the epidemic situation in Wuhan came under control after a rigorous COVID-19 testing and tracing campaign by the Chinese government.
“The thing that would be best is that if the United States could learn from and copy what China did in Wuhan. Their use of aggressive testing at scale, population scale testing was how they wiped out the final stage of this infection in Wuhan. That same approach is what we should be doing in the United States throughout the country and unfortunately we are not. So the prospect at the moment is that the current situation is likely to continue,” said Paul.
Wuhan organized a citywide testing campaign from May 14, where nucleic acid tests covered almost 11 million residents, with tests had completed by June 2.
“If we did roughly what they did in Wuhan we could be certain to drive this virus basically down very close to zero within a relatively short period of time. This is the model we should copy. The administration in Wuhan has shown it’s possible. We should just do it,” said Paul.
In the U.S., the number of COVID-19 cases has topped 2.13 million, reaching 2,134,973 as of 23:33 GMT Tuesday, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.
Published By Harry Miller
Source: www.cctvplus.com
