Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned Sunday that Georgia was “jumping the gun” in beginning to gradually reopen some businesses over the weekend.

“Georgia’s certainly jumping the gun I think, getting started too early relative to where they are in their epidemic,” Gottlieb said on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” saying the state is “only testing about 1 percent of their total population.”

ANALYSIS: “Georgia is certainly not out of the woods,” @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan and that the state continues to see increases in #coronavirus cases as the state is set to reopen sectors of its economy. “Georgia is jumping the gun,” he adds. pic.twitter.com/ccq6LSOUqL — Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 26, 2020

Gottlieb warned that the downward slope of the outbreak in the U.S. was unlikely to resemble that of China, where data shows it was similarly steep to the upward slope, and more like Italy, where it was far slower and more gradual.

Some models like closely watched IHME predict a symmetric epidemic curve, where slope of decline is proportional to slope of the rise. That was mostly the case in China, but not in Italy. And it won't be the case in U.S. Our decline will be far more gradual, similar to Italy. 2/n pic.twitter.com/PjQ5bQ4RNs — Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 26, 2020

“It’s going to take a long time until we see sustained decline in new cases and get to the point where there’s a low enough level of spread in the country that we feel comfortable about opening up parts of the country,” he told CBS’ Margaret Brennan, adding “it’s going to probably be mid-May, maybe late May in parts of this nation.”

Brennan also asked Gottlieb about the drug hydroxychloroquine, frequently prescribed for lupus and arthritis and which President Trump Donald John TrumpOmar fires back at Trump over rally remarks: 'This is my country' Pelosi: Trump hurrying to fill SCOTUS seat so he can repeal ObamaCare Trump mocks Biden appearance, mask use ahead of first debate MORE repeatedly touted as a possible treatment for coronavirus before the FDA issued a warning that the drug could cause serious cardiac events or death outside of a clinical setting.

“I don’t think doctors should be using it outside of protocols at this point given that we’ve now had accruing evidence demonstrating really no benefit and some indication that it could be causing harm,” Gottlieb said.

“I think it’s still reasonable to conduct clinical studies with it to see if it could be a treatment but we’ve done a lot of clinical studies to date and we haven’t turned over a card that’s really shown that the drug’s effective,” he added.