U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams walks outside the West Wing of the White House on March 5, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. surgeon general, says that Americans should expect the coronavirus outbreak to get substantially worse this week.
That’s because he says that people across the country aren’t taking the pandemic seriously enough.
Everyone needs to act as if they have the virus right now. So, test or no test. We need you to understand you could be spreading it to someone else. Or you could be getting it from someone else. Stay at home.
“I want America to understand — this week, it’s going to get bad,” Adams told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, adding that some people have not been properly practicing social distancing.
Currently, there are more than 34,000 Americans infected with the coronavirus across all 50 states. At least 414 people have died.
Utah saw its first death due to the virus this weekend.
“Right now, there are not enough people out there who are taking this seriously,” he said.
The surgeon general hoped that the spike in coronavirus numbers would relate to many people, especially young people, who are not abiding by the guidance to stay home and in groups of less than ten more than six feet apart.
Adams says that when the guidelines of the ’15 days to slow the spread’ were released, the US was about two weeks behind Italy in our cases of coronavirus. The idea was to help spread the urgency.
“These mitigation measures work preventatively. They work best the earlier you do them, and people are still reacting and waiting to see spread before they get serious.
“Everyone needs to act as if they have the virus right now. So, test or no test. We need you to understand you could be spreading it to someone else. Or you could be getting it from someone else. Stay at home,” he said.
Adams says that the best course of action is to ensure that we prevent the spread as best as we can because he says this situation isn’t something that we can treat our way out of.
“The other important point is that we’re not going to ventilator our way out of this problem. We’re not going to treat our way out of this problem,” he said. “The way you stop the spread of an infectious disease like this is with mitigation measures and preventing people from getting it in the first place.”
