New York Emergency Room Doctor: There Will Be “Thousands” Of Confirmed Cases In The U.S. “By Next Week”

Michael Snyder



Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, just went on national television and warned that there will be “thousands” of confirmed coronavirus cases inside the United States “by next week”. I certainly hope that he is completely wrong, but obviously, he has a better vantage point for observing the progression of this outbreak than any of us do.

As an emergency room doctor in New York, he is dealing with potential COVID-19 cases every single day. And as you will see below, he says that he has had to “plead to test people” and that it is a “national scandal” that more people have not been tested.

As I discussed in a previous article, up until just a few days ago the CDC has had extremely restrictive guidelines for who should be tested for the virus.  Only those that have visited China recently and those that have had close contact with a known victim were supposed to be tested.  Obviously this allowed a lot of potential victims to fall through the cracks, and now we have a major outbreak in the Seattle area.

Why couldn’t we have been able to test anyone that wanted to be tested from the very beginning?  In South Korea, they have already “built drive-thru coronavirus screening locations”… Health officials in South Korea tested 10,000 people for the coronavirus on Friday alone. This week, they built drive-thru coronavirus screening locations, giving hundreds of patients an assessment of their health in just 10 minutes.

The US announced its first coronavirus case on the same day South Korea did. But six weeks later, less than 500 potentially infected Americans have gotten tests, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency’s official test count — which had previously been updated daily — was stripped from the CDC site on Sunday, though US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told ABC the same day that the US had tested 3,600 people. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t do at least as well as South Korea.