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NEW YORK – The United States government was slow to understand how much the coronavirus was spreading from Europe, which helped accelerate outbreaks across the country, a senior health official said Friday.
Limited testing and delayed travel alerts for areas outside of China contributed to the jump in US cases. USA Starting in late February, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the No. 2 official with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA
“We clearly did not recognize the full imports that were taking place,” Schuchat told The Associated Press.
The coronavirus was first reported late last year in China, the initial epicenter of the global pandemic. But the United States has since become the most affected nation, with about a third of the reported cases in the world and more than a quarter of the deaths.
The CDC released an article Friday, written by Schuchat, which analyzed the United States’ response, recapitulating some of the major decisions and events of the past few months. He suggests that the nation’s top public health agency missed opportunities to curb the spread. Some public health experts considered it an important assessment by one of the country’s most respected public health doctors.
CDC is responsible for the recognition, monitoring, and prevention of such disease. But the agency has had a low profile during this pandemic, with White House officials controlling communications and leading most of the press sessions.
“The degree to which the CDC’s public presence has decreased so much … is one of the most striking and downright baffling aspects of the federal government’s response,” said Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at the School of Health. Yale Public.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly celebrated a federal decision, announced on January 31, to stop the entry into the United States of any foreign national who has traveled to China in the previous 14 days. That went into effect on February 2. China had imposed its own travel restrictions before, and travel outside its outbreak areas decreased dramatically.
But in his article, Schuchat noted that nearly 2 million travelers came to the US. USA From Italy and other European countries during February. The US government USA He didn’t block travel from there until March 11.
“The extensive journey from Europe, once Europe had outbreaks, really accelerated our imports and the rapid spread,” he told the AP. “I think the timing of our travel alerts should have been earlier.”
He also noted in the article that more than 100 people who had been on nine separate Nile River cruises during February and early March had come to the United States and tested positive for the virus, nearly doubling the number of known cases at the time. .
The article is carefully worded, but Schwartz saw it as a notable departure from the White House narrative.
“This report seems to challenge the idea that the travel ban to China in late January was critical to changing the trajectory of this pandemic in the United States,” he said.
In the article, Schuchat also noted the explosive effect of some mass gatherings in late February, including a scientific meeting in Boston, the Mardis Gras celebration in New Orleans, and a funeral in Albany, Georgia. The meetings generated many cases and led to decisions in mid-March to restrict crowds.
When asked about that during the interview, Schuchat said: “I think in hindsight taking action sooner could have delayed further amplification (of the US outbreak) or slowed down the speed of it.”
But he also noted that there was an evolving public understanding of how bad things were, as well as a change in what kinds of measures, including orders to stay home, people were willing to accept.
“I think, unfortunately, people’s willingness to accept mitigation is greater once they see the damage that the virus can do,” he said. “There will be discussions about whether we should have started much earlier, or whether we went too far too fast.”
Schuchat’s article still leaves many questions unanswered, said Dr. Howard Markel, a public health historian at the University of Michigan.
It does not reveal what kinds of proposals were made, and perhaps ignored, during the critical period before the US cases. USA They will start taking off in late February, he said.
“I want to know … the talks, the memoranda and the presidential edicts,” said Markel, who wrote history books on past pandemics. “Because I still think this didn’t have to be as bad as it turned out.”
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Department of Scientific Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
