CDC director offers bleak public health outlook for fall and winter
Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimated that “between March and April and May, we probably actually had 20 million infections in the United States.”
“We went back and looked, using antibody testing to get an understanding of how extensive the infection was,” Redfield said during a webinar with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Tuesday.
While the US only officially diagnosed 2 million cases, he said “in that period of time, it was probably 10 to 1.”
“Between March and April and May, we probably actually had 20 million infections in the United States,” Redfield said. “We only diagnosed 2 million.”
Redfield said the US could have been having 150,000 to 200,000 infections a day, “even though we were only diagnosing 20,000 a day.”
The current situation is a “very, very significant problem right now,” he added.
“This is a serious issue, as you know. We’re currently diagnosing, say, 60,000 cases a day. I don’t know how many infections that really represents,” Redfield said.
