More hope for the beleagured bar and restaurant industries. Dr. Rochelle P. Walendky, who took over the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, promised “better, healthier days lie ahead. But to get there, COVID-19 testing, surveillance, and vaccination must accelerate rapidly.”
The promise of increased testing is good news to operators of bars and restaurants. Everywhere there has been intensive testing, disease positivity rates have gone down, often dramatically, when accompanied by aggressive contact tracing and quanrantine and isolation measures.
In addition to calling for confronting “the the longstanding public health challenges of social and racial injustice and inequity that have demanded action for far too long,” she said the U.S. must ” make up for potentially lost ground in areas like suicide, substance use disorder and overdose, chronic diseases, and global health initiatives.”
Comment: We hope her attention to substance use disorder does not signal a return to CDC’s antialcohol posture of the past.