Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA, director of ICAP at Columbia University, is quoted in a June 25 article in Fast Company stating that the ‘first wave’ of COVID-19 in the U.S. is not over, and is actually getting worse:
Experts largely agree on the goals for virus suppression. “Until we have a safe and effective vaccine that everyone takes, what needs to happen is we try and sustain this low level of transmission, which I think is a balancing act,” says Wafaa El-Sadr, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University. She says that will involve wearing masks and limiting social contacts consistently. But she worries that, thanks to disinformation like Pence’s op-ed, public health messaging has become politicized.
“There’s this pitting of public health and economic health, but we don’t want to pit those against each other,” she says. It’s vital that people are able to get back to work, she says, but they need to wear face coverings and keep an appropriate distance from colleagues. “We need these public health measures, we need to sustain them as much as possible until we have a vaccine,” she says.
Read more on the Fast Company website
Read the latest ICAP updates on COVID-19 here
