Dr. Scott Gottlieb on "Face the Nation" says cases are peaking in the South, very hard weeks ahead

[Emily]

https://news.yahoo.com/transcript-dr-scott-gottlieb-face-160243362.html

Transcript: Dr. Scott Gottlieb on "Face the Nation"

CBS News
Sun, August 22, 2021, 12:02 PM·8 min read


The following is a transcript of an interview with former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb that aired on Sunday, August 22, 2021, on "Face the Nation."

MAJOR GARRETT: We turn now to former FDA commissioner and Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb..

...

MAJOR GARRETT: Are case rates beginning to peak in the south where the Delta variant has hit the hardest?

DR. GOTTLIEB: Yeah, that's definitely the case. If you go to covidestim.org, run by the Harvard Chan School, which looks at whether the epidemics are expanding or contracting they're showing across the south right now, the Rt, the rate of transmission, is below one, which means you have a contracting epidemic across the south. Now there's still very hard weeks ahead because they're still going to continue to accrue more hospitalizations and there's extreme pressure on those health care systems. But there is evidence that the epidemic is starting to slow and the day over day cases are starting to decline. And that's showing up in the national trends. Now, Florida, which has been the epicenter of the epidemic in this country, if you look across different age categories in Florida, every age category shows a declining number of cases day over day, except for school age kids, kids ages six to 19. That's the only category that's still expanding and expanding very quickly, because what's happening is they're opening schools earlier in the south. Schools opened earlier in the south against the backdrop of still a lot of prevalence. And the infection is getting into schools and it's proving to be hard to control schools. Delta is a very contagious variant. And so I think that this is a harbinger of the challenges that we're going to face nationally. As schools reopen, the schools could become focal points of community transmission and can become environments that aren't safe for children if we can't control very large outbreaks from happening in those settings...

[sharon sanders]

Interesting. He is going against several studies that said school age children are not spreading COVID-19. That is ridiculous. Every parent knows that young children bring home a various collection of illnesses when school starts. Common sense strikes again.