Dr. Jha on coronavirus: We still have a long way to go but we're making progress
Coronavirus cases in U.S. surge past 10,000; Dr. Ashish Jha shares his expertise on the outbreak response.
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The director of Harvard University's Global Health Institute predicted Thursday it will take two weeks to determine the true number of coronavirus patients in the U.S. as more tests continue to become available.
"We are still kind of in the exponential phase," Dr. Ashish Jha told "Bill Hemmer Reports, Thursday.
"I'm hopeful that in the next two weeks, we will have a much better sense of where we are as a country, we will do enough testing, and identify enough people that are infected ... and we can actually say with confidence how much the virus is in our community, in our town and we can then make a plan."
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Jha told host Bill Hemmer that that while the U.S. is "nowhere near where we need to be" with regard to testing, "I've been feeling a bit more optimistic, the logjam is starting to break as well."
"I think we should be testing 150,000 Americans a day maybe, even more," Jha went on. "Yesterday we think we tested probably 20,000 or 25,000 ... that's better than where we were a week ago ... and we still have a long way to go but we are making progress."
Jha also responded to President Trump's announcement that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is making experimental drugs such as chloroquine -- a drug designed to treat malaria -- available to test whether it helps patients recover from coronavirus. Trump also noted that another drug, remdesivir, would be made available for testing as well.
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"We’ve known about chloroquine as a potential drug for Covid-19 and remdesivir is also another one where we had some very preliminary data," Jha said.
"There isn't any major news today that somehow these drugs are more effective than what we knew a couple of weeks ago. They are still very preliminary. We don't have great evidence that they are available, but the president is absolutely right," he continued.
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Jha said it is critical that production and testing of the experimental drugs be ramped up to determine their effectiveness.
The announcement was the latest aggressive move by the Trump administration as it seeks to stop the spread of the virus and curb the economic havoc caused by the closing of many businesses across America that have shuttered in the hope of stopping the spread of infection.
Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
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