U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-TN-07) said Thursday he has contacted Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and suggested he now restore to doctors their previously-held right to perform non-emergency medical procedures.
Green said this on a COVID-19 Facebook Live Town Hall. Green said this after one of his constituents asked how much longer the state-mandated stay-at-home orders will last.
“Predicting when the stay-at-home order [ends] is going to be a little bit challenging. It’s a matter of looking at the curve, seeing where we are in the curve and then listening to the scientists. We are obviously much more informed today than we were yesterday. We may be able to turn the economy on for younger people — and I’m not saying that’s what we do. What I’m saying is those are the out-of-the-box things we are going to be thinking about,” Green said.
“Maybe we could turn the economy on for tomorrow. I texted the governor today and said ‘Let’s get non-emergent medical stuff going.’ If you have a small tumor that is a slow-growing tumor you might want to get that cut off sooner rather than later, right? Right now if we have a hospital with no COVID patient then that hospital could do a non-emergent surgical procedure. So, that was my text to the governor today, and I unfortunately missed my call with him.”
Another constituent asked Green if the stay-at-home quarantine has helped flatten the COVID-19 curve.
To that, Green said “absolutely.”
“The models we initially were looking at said at least 1 million dead Americans. I remember when I did the math for my wife, when we were sitting in the kitchen, I said that would be 1 million dead Americans. Fortunately, with the mitigation, that is significantly better,” Green said.
“It was down to 90,000 [predictive deaths] on Monday, and now we are down to predicted total deaths from the United States at around 60,400. The mitigation has helped save lives. There is no doubt about it. As much as I hated stopping the economy and putting businesses at risk, we had to save lives by doing just that.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Mark Green” by Mark Green.
Open up everything. That is the only rational path to take.
This would be a great start to “opening” up the state. How many people will die or be irreparably affected because they couldn’t see their doctor or get timely treatment for a non-cough/fever/viral disorder?
And all because the CCP and WHO covered up the magnitude of the disease AND a bunch of “orange man bad” kleptocrats were willing to crash our economy, as a last ditch effort to get rid of Trump. You know their game plan, “never let a good crisis go to waste”.
But patriots are on to them!