Following up on Donald Trump's late Sunday night tweet setting out a fifteen-day deadline for his administration to get a handle on how far-reaching the coronavirus pandemic has spread, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta poured cold water on the idea -- saying it doesn't comport with timelines for testing, results and analysis.
Speaking with the "New Day" hosts, Gupta seemed dismayed with the president tweeting, "We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself, at the end of the 15-day period we’ll make a decision which way to go."
"Look, I mean, we're not -- we're not there yet, that's pretty clear," he explained. "Even when this was first proposed, they said we'll do it for two weeks and reassess. A couple things to keep in mind: first of all the amount of -- when you're testing patients, you're really getting a lag time. It takes several days for someone after the time of exposure to the time that they develop symptoms and then two to three days to get the test. By the time you're testing people, it's about two weeks after they've been exposed already."
"If you take that into account, you'd have to add at least two weeks from this time period now," he continued. "If you look at countries around the world, you'd have to enact social distancing measures for them to have the impact. I've been talking to public health officials on and off the record, they say the goal was always to try and do this for two weeks, reassess, but the belief was that at that point we might have to get more stringent."
"You can't find any medical provider out there who says that we're anywhere near the peak," host John Berman. 'And that may not be the testing, it may be because the disease is being passed around at a quick rate."
Watch below:
