Transcript of video
Dr. Anton Titov, MD. You are an expert in health security. What is your evaluation of the current response to the COVID-19 Coronavirus situation? This is probably the most challenging pandemic or infectious disease emergency that you have seen in over 100 years. Dr. Amesh Adalja. We have a very scattered response in different countries and even within the United States where there have been major mistakes and how this has been handled in terms of diagnostic testing, in terms of understanding what the spread of this virus is, initially we thought this was animal to human with limited human to human and trying to be able to right sighs our interventions to be able to stop this outbreak. Dr. Amesh Adalja. That this pandemic is going to be one that patients will write about and analyze for a long, long time because we have been warning about this a pandemic. What we have seen is many of our, our worst predictions come true in terms of how this basically across the country and how it led to major political disruptions and economic disruptions just as we had we have predicted. It is something that could have been preventable with better pandemic preparedness. What additional measures or maybe reformist measures would you like to see countries should be doing right now and especially countries with relatively lower numbers of COVID-19 Coronavirus patients, for example, Russia? I would like to see extensive diagnostic testing. Dr. Amesh Adalja. I would like to see diagnostic testing being done at the point of care, even home testing, so that we have a better picture of what’s going on in all of those countries. Dr. Amesh Adalja. I would also like to see resources, prioritize the hospitals in terms of ventilators and ICU beds and increase capacity because that is the real issue here is finding the cases and isolating them and being able to take care of those individuals who need hospitalization. Those are the big challenges that we face in this pandemic. All countries, irrespective of how many cases they have now should be making those preparations.