Speaking to CNBC, Gottlieb, who no longer works in the Trump administration, warned that there simply aren't enough hospital beds in the Big Apple to accommodate all of the new patients seeking medical care. Within weeks, he added, sick patients will probably start getting turned away.
"New York City hospitals right now are on the brink of what I would call being maxed out in terms of their available capacity," Gottlieb is quoted as saying.
"New York has another about five weeks to go for this between now and when they're going to hit peak hospitalizations, so the fact that they're stretched right now is worrisome."
More than 15,500 people in New York City are said to have the Chinese Virus (COVID-19), and some 192 people thus far in the city are said to have died from it. Both of these numbers are expected to increase, according to Johns Hopkins University, if hospitals end up reaching capacity as Gottlieb is predicting.
At least 25 percent of the known Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the U.S. have been identified in New York City, though there are likely many undiagnosed cases all across our land who are carrying and spreading the virus undetected. There have also been delays in ramping up testing and getting medical supplies to where they need to be.
As you may have seen, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went on a tirade the other day about how there are as little as 3,000 ventilators in his state right now, despite the need for at least 30,000 more. Cuomo also lamented that New York could need up to 140,000 hospitals beds in the next 14 to 21 days, and currently only has about 53,000.
Listen below as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, discusses how the Trump administration's handling of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is definitely helping to slow its spread:
Medical students at NYU allowed to graduate early to aid in coronavirus combat
Meanwhile, New York University has announced that it will be allowing its medical students to graduate early so they can get to work helping other healthcare staff in the city to combat the spread of the novel virus.
"The hospitals really are at the point of getting extremely pressed and perhaps being overwhelmed in cities like New York right now," Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor and board member at pharmaceutical company Pfizer and biotech company Illumina, added.
"Once that happens, then the mortality rate is going to start to increase. It's going to accelerate."
Gottlieb predicts that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) will soon create similar localized epidemics in other large cities such as Miami, Chicago, New Orleans and Atlanta, which is why the disinformation coming out of communist China about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) being under control is a threat to public health.
While some states and areas of the country have instituted "stay at home" lockdowns that prohibit anything other than essential activities from taking place, it would seem as though Gottlieb and others want to see such policies be instituted nationwide.
"If other cities start to have epidemics at a staggered period and on the scale of New York, where we have to now marshal resources and move them into those cities, this is going to be a longer epidemic for the entire country," Gottlieb contends.
"Italy is locked down. Many parts of Europe are locked down. The United States is not locked down and we haven't done that universally, we haven't done that federally. We've done that state by state but the majority of states are still not locked down," he further added.
More up-to-the-minute news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is available at Pandemic.news.
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