US ill-prepared to combat the coronavirus pandemic: Expert

An internationally-recognized American epidemiologist, who is an expert on bio-security, has warned that the United States “is ill-prepared to combat the coronavirus” pandemic.

Michael Osterholm, 66, who for nearly two decades has been one of the leading figures in the global campaign against the use of biological agents as weapons against civilians, has said that the US was short in all the equipment and supplies required to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Osterholm told CNN in a recent interview that the Trump administration's health budget cuts had made matters even worse.

The US expert in disease transmission insisted there was very little vacant capacity in the US healthcare system to adequately deal with the impact of the coronavirus.

"[T]he health care system is stretched thinner now than ever. There is no excess capacity. And public health funding has been cut under this administration," he said.

Osterholm said US hospitals lacked much-needed facilities such as air ventilators and respirators to treat the patients suffering from infectious diseases such as the deadly COVID-19 virus.

"Right now, today, in Minneapolis-St. Paul, every one of the beds that we use for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a high-level machine that supports the heart and lungs and is critical for keeping people alive who have illness like COVID-19, are filled," he noted.

He pointed out in the CNN interview that there was also a shortage of protective clothing known as personal protective equipment (PPE) that doctors, nurses and health care staff in hospitals wore in the wards.

"No health care organization has gone out and stockpiled lots of personal protective equipment ...Hospitals throughout the country have only 5 to 10 days' worth of personal protective equipment available for health care workers. They don't know when over-stretched PPE manufacturers will be able to deliver more," he noted.

He said the lack of medical equipment and necessary resources will have a grave toll on the medical staff.

"When health care workers start dying or get severely ill and they go from being care providers to needing care -- and hospitals are not able to handle patients because of a reduced number of health care workers -- I think that's when you run the risk of people losing confidence in its government and leaders," he said.

The American epidemiologist warned that an extraordinary amount of new transmission was occurring all over the US that needed testing kits which were also in shortage.

"In our country there is widespread transmission going on now. It's just being missed, and as soon as we have testing, we're going to see it."

Watch here Osterholm's another interview on the coronavirus pandemic.  

Osterholm said the chances that the spreading of the disease would decrease as the air gets warmer were slim, and he insisted that washing the hands was not enough to stop the transmission of the air-borne virus.

He called for greater government efforts to contain the pandemic.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk