Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said Sunday that a New York Times report on the federal response to the coronavirus indicated that if some officials’ warnings had been heeded, “we’d be in a much better position.”

“If we’d acted on some of those warnings earlier, we’d be in a much better position in terms of diagnostics and possibly masks and possibly personal protective equipment and getting our hospitals ready,” Inglesby told Chris Wallace Christopher (Chris) WallaceBiden town hall draws 3.3 million viewers for CNN Gates says travel ban made COVID-19 worse in US CNN slammed for soft questions during Biden town hall: 'The media is broken' MORE on “Fox News Sunday.”

“It’s possible we would have seen enough disease to get the will to do that in February, and, yes, the earlier we put in place social distancing, the earlier we would have gotten to a peak,” he added.

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Inglesby told Wallace that despite some hopeful signs on the number of confirmed cases of the virus day to day, it was vital that the U.S. not be overly hasty in reopening parts of the economy.

“We are near a plateau in the number of cases. ... It doesn’t mean the downslope of the peak is going to be fast,” he said, adding, “I think it’ll be too soon to open the country on May 1,” although there may be parts of the U.S. that are ready for some limited reopenings.

“If we’re not careful when we ease social distancing, we’ll recreate the conditions that existed back in early March,” Inglesby said. "We need to be able to have the capacity so if someone says, ‘I feel like I’m getting a flu or pneumonia,’ they can walk into a clinic or a hospital or a testing center and get that test that day and get the results hopefully that day so they can be in isolation, so that we can identify their contacts.”

"That number’s going to differ from state to state depending on how they’re organized," he continued. "But it’s going to need to be a lot different than it is now."