Health official says US missed some chances to slow virus

[mfcorey1]

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government was slow to understand how much coronavirus was spreading from Europe, which helped drive the acceleration of outbreaks across the nation, a top health official said Friday.


Limited testing and delayed travel alerts for areas outside China contributed to the jump in U.S. cases starting in late February, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


“We clearly didn’t recognize the full importations that were happening,” Schuchat told The Associated Press.

The coronavirus was first reported late last year in China, the initial epicenter of the global pandemic. But the U.S. has since become the hardest-hit nation, with about a third of the world's reported cases and more than a quarter of the deaths.

The CDC on Friday published an article, authored by Schuchat, that looked back on the U.S. response, recapping some of the major decisions and events of the last few months. It suggests the nation’s top public health agency missed opportunities to slow the spread. Some public health experts saw it as important assessment by one of the nation's most respected public health doctors.

The CDC is responsible for the recognition, tracking and prevention of just such a disease. But the agency has had a low profile during this pandemic, with White House officials controlling communications and leading most press briefings.

“The degree to which CDC’s public presence has been so diminished ... is one of the most striking and frankly puzzling aspects of the federal government’s response,” said Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly celebrated a federal decision, announced on Jan. 31, to stop entry into the U.S. of any foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days. That took effect Feb. 2. China had imposed its own travel restrictions earlier, and travel out of its outbreak areas did indeed drop dramatically.

But in her article, Schuchat noted that nearly 2 million travelers arrived in the U.S. from Italy and other European countries during February. The U.S. government didn't block travel from there until March 11.

“The extensive travel from Europe, once Europe was having outbreaks, really accelerated our importations and the rapid spread,” she told the AP. ”I think the timing of our travel alerts should have been earlier."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/health-official-says-us-missed-some-chances-to-slow-virus/ar-BB13uhLN?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

[Squinch]

1. Gee, health officials. Ya think?

[Igel]

2. Most of the story isn't what people reading just the headlines think.

It basically points out that there was widespread community transmission in Europe and that we should have blocked flights from Europe sooner.

The key word, however, is "slowed". By then there was already community transmission, undetected, on the West Coast (and probably also in NYC). Contact tracing on the first community-transmitted cases originally documented in California hit a brick wall--they never found the source(s) of the infection. Suspicion is it was asymptomatic transmission. Later revision of the timeline showed that it was being transmitted earlier than originally thought--by the time it was announced that human-to-human transmission was just more than "possible" but expected to be rare and was, in fact, worse than the flu, the first people that would later die in California had been infected. As we debated whether community transmission could be occurring in the US, they died. Until that issue was resolved, the CDC's guidelines weren't suspected of being a disaster.

For being a no-brainer, a bunch of mixed people had feelings about the European travel ban. Some thought that the UK/Ireland should have been included. But probably half, perhaps more, thought it a stupid idea. (Of course, now the only thing they'll admit to being stupid about was why we didn't ban flights from Europe last November when everybody knew this was going to be a pandemic.)

A few, I think, realized it was a good idea. One DUer (I forget who made it or what thread it was in) when challenging somebody who thought the ban was a horrible idea pointed out that the world was round.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213076185
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213075813
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/10142445936

I especially liked one comment that said since Europe had such good testing it wasn't a threat--we were more of a threat to them. (Take that, NYC and your strain of SARS-CoV-2 imported from China by way of Germany via northern Italy.)

And many more.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/europe/europe-coronavirus-travel-ban.html?auth=login-email&login=email is about par for the course. Europe wasn't a danger, it wasn't providing a source of infection, the ban wasn't thought out well and offended our allies who might properly take revenge, it wouldn't be effective, it was just Trump being as xenophobic as always.

It misses the point that every seed infection is another spot for something to grow from. It's another place that requires resources and attention. Every new incident is another source of infection that could be overlooked. Fewer point infections = slower growth.

Now it's "ya think". The NYT was always behind the travel ban, and, in fact, it should have been done earlier. (In fact, what the NYT said about the travel ban from Europe was the same thing it said about the travel ban from China in January. It was xenophobic, offensive, ineffective, a horrible idea. Until Trump was bad for having waited so long, because it was obvious that the ban was necessary. Taiwan and S. Korea did it right: It barred Taiwanese nationals from returning until a process was set up for it. In the case of Taiwan, that hadn't happened as of two weeks ago, and the PRC really wanted the Taiwanese stranded in Wuhan gone. S. Korea set up screening, testing, and isolation for S. Koreans returning to their country.)