Quotes About Pandemic

The reality is that front-line workers like restaurant servers, bus drivers and retail store clerks - whose jobs require person-to-person interactions - do not have the luxury of being able to 'work from home.'

When the coronavirus-positive cases were 500 in the country, you ordered the shops to shut down, and now when the tally has crossed 50,000 you are opening them. I don't understand the logic.

Of course, health is the most important thing, but shutting down the entire economy for months is also not an option. Everyone should use their common sense.

The difference between H7N9 and H5N1, is that H5N1 kills chickens very rapidly, so it is easy to identify where the infected flocks of chickens are. H7N9 doesn't make the chicken sick, so it has been difficult to pinpoint where the infected chickens are.

Even during this COVID-19 pandemic, we haven't lost sight of the improvements in technology our state is making to streamline the way we do business.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

There is so much inequality and injustice in America, and COVID-19 has exposed that even more. We have to really understand that this is a wake up call; this is a time of action.

Coronavirus has exposed for all what many of us already knew - some of our most important workers have barely enough to live on, and millions are condemned to financial insecurity, inequality and food poverty.

Just like normal times, during this outbreak, there are still a lot of foolish people doing foolish things. But, these days, it is not just the foolish committing those foolish acts.

A virus doesn't understand politics.

People really wanted to hear me say that what they were considering [with regard to activities during the COVID-19 pandemic] was okay, no matter what that was. It just doesn't work that way. The most important message was limit your contact to just a very few people.

Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.

We have lived with deadly levels of air pollution for years, which have made us more vulnerable to coronavirus.

When we can get the incidence of HIV down enough to turn the trajectory of the pandemic, it will assume a momentum of its own in diminishing HIV.

There are critical issues facing us, including handling transportation of lakhs of migrants, completing harvest and procurement on time, supporting poor and needy, and above all, combating the spread of the pandemic.

Many experts believe that a cholera-like pandemic looms. In a survey by the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, 90 percent of epidemiologists said that a pandemic that will sicken 1 billion, kill up to 165 million, and trigger a global recession that could cost up to $3 trillion would occur sometime in the next two generations.

The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.

The pattern continued right through the pandemic: the Trump administration would claim with fanfare that supplies were on their way to the states and leave it to the career civil servants whose job was to interact with state officials to reap the humiliation when those supplies failed to arrive. It would happen again with ventilators, with the drug Remdesivir, and, finally, with vaccines

No one knew why some people were superspreaders:

Why was it still possible, in 2006, to say something original and important about the events of 1918? Why had it taken nearly a century to see a simple truth about the single most deadly pandemic in human history? Only after three amateur historians studied the various interventions, and the various death tolls in individual American cities, did the importance of timing became obvious.

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system

There was no vaccine in sight; and the number of infections required to achieve herd immunity could be calculated, as it was a simple function of the reproductive rate. (The formula was 1 ? 1/R0, where R0 was the reproduction number.)

Each of the crude strategies had some slight effect, but none by itself made much of a dent, and certainly none had the ability to halt the pandemic by driving the disease's reproductive rate below 1. One intervention was not like the others, however: when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff.

If anything like the 1918 flu occurred, the basic functions of the society would come to a halt, and no one in the federal government seemed to have worried about it.