A high number of New York residents have contacted the city health authorities over fears that they had ingested bleach or other household cleaners hours after Donald Trump touted disinfectant as a possible ‘cure’ for coronavirus.
Daily News reports that the New York Poison Control Center, which is a sub-agency of the city’s Health Department, took 30 calls between Thursday at 9 pm and Friday at 3 pm.
“To be clear, disinfectants are not intended for ingestion either by mouth, by ears, by breathing them in any way, shape or form. And doing so can put people at great risk,” New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot tweeted on Friday.
A report also stated that None of the people who contacted Poison Control died or needed to go to the hospital.
The state of Maryland also said that more than 100 calls were made to Maryland’s state’s emergency hotline in the wake of Trump’s controversial statement.
Which made that state to send out an alert after people kept calling, questioning the advice on consuming disinfectant as a possible treatment to the deadly virus.
On Thursday, President Trump, During a press briefing suggested the possibility of an “injection” of disinfectant into a person infected with the coronavirus as a deterrent to the disease.
Trump’s odd suggestion came after he learned about the effects of sunlight and household disinfectants on the novel coronavirus.
The senior Department of Homeland Security official, Bill Bryan, who leads the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology division, gave a presentation on research his team has conducted that shows that warmer and humid temperature cuts half the life of the coronavirus. Bryan said, “The virus dies quickest in sunlight”.
As a result of Bryan’s research, Trump wondered whether people could bring the light “inside the body,” and suggested that experts should find a way to inject light and disinfectants into human bodies to kill the virus.
“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked because of the testing and then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too,” Trump said, speaking to Bryan during the briefing.
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that,” the POTUS added, even though he didn’t specify the kind of disinfectant to substantiate his claim.
