Doctors reacted with fear to President Donald Trump’s statement on Twitter that Covid-19 is similar to the flu and that the United States is learning to live with it. Social media reported the tweet with a warning.
“Comparing influenza to Covid-19 is simply a bad lens,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s simply morally reprehensible. “
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Tuesday morning, Trump, who remains under the care of a doctor for covid-19, tweeted, “The flu season is coming!Many other people each year, more than 100,000, and despite the vaccine, die of flu. Are we going to close our country? No, we have been informed to live, as well as we are informed to live with Covid, in the maximum of the much less fatal populations !!!”
Within hours, Twitter reported the tweet with a warning, saying it “violates Twitter regulations related to the dissemination of misleading and potentially harmful data similar to COVID-19. “Facebook deleted a similar message from the president.
It turns out that the tweet recommends that the flu is more fatal than coronavirus. The figures obviously show the opposite: the last flu season, there were about 38 million cases of influenza, adding 400,000 hospitalizations and 22,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Prevention So far this year for Covid-19, there have been 7. 5 million cases and 211,000 deaths.
In fact, there have been more Covid-19-related deaths in less than a year in the United States than in recent combined flu seasons.
Dr. Michael Saag, associate dean of global fitness at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, said he was “appalled” by the death toll.
“This is not an appropriate result,” Saag said. “He yells at me to do something about it. “
“The idea of just learning to live with it is an appropriate policy or strategy, in my opinion. “
Saag, a researcher and physician who has treated HIV/AIDS patients since the 1980s, said there is “nothing worse” in his career than “caring for many other people for which we had no treatment. “
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“Instead of just raising our hands and saying, ‘Well, it’s just going to kill other people,’ we work together, as a clinical network and as a society, to expand the interventions that resulted in most HIV cases. “other positive people who live an almost general life expectancy,” Saag said.
A similar clinic has resulted in flu prevention treatments and options.
“We have methods to treat the flu. We have Tamiflu, which is an oral tablet that other people can get on an outpatient basis. We have a vaccine,” Chin-Hong said, “With Covid, we are in the middle of a terrible epidemic. “
Clinical trials of Covid-19 vaccines are still ongoing. The entire population remains largely threatened as there is no immunity that opposes such a new virus.
Although influenza viruses replace year after year, “there is still a lot of cross-immunity with previous influenza viruses, as well as the fact that millions of doses of the flu vaccine are given each year,” dr. Priya Sampathkumar, a health care specialist at the Mayo Clinic in RochesterArray Minnesota, said.
“Even if the vaccine doesn’t have perfect compatibility with the flu strain, it still protects it. Ten years from now, Covid can look like the flu, when we have vaccines and most of the population is immune,” he added.
For now, the only effective way to prevent the spread of coronavirus, according to experts, is physical distance, mask and hand washing.
“We deserve to be respectful of Covid-19,” Chin-Hong said. I’m revered through Covid, clinically. It teaches us everything new. “
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