The lost month: How a failure to test blinded the U.S. to coronavirus
WASHINGTON — Early on, the dozen federal officials charged with defending America against the coronavirus gathered day after day in the White House Situation Room, consumed by crises. They grappled with how to evacuate the U.S. consulate in Wuhan, China, ban Chinese travelers and extract Americans from the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships.
The absence of robust screening until it was “far too late” revealed failures across government, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, a former CDC director. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said the Trump administration had “incredibly limited” views of the pathogen’s potential impact. Dr. Margaret Hamburg, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said the lapse enabled “exponential growth of cases.
The CDC also tightly restricted who could get tested and was slow to conduct “community-based surveillance,” a standard screening practice to detect the virus’s reach. Had the U.S. been able to track its earliest movements and identify hidden hot spots, local quarantines might have confined the disease.
At the start of that crucial lost month, when his government could have rallied, the president was distracted by impeachment and dismissive of the threat to the public’s health or the nation’s economy. By the end of the month, Trump claimed the virus was about to dissipate in the U.S., saying: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization, led an expert team to China last month to research the mysterious new virus. Testing, he said, was “absolutely vital” for understanding how to defeat a disease — what distinguishes it from others, the spectrum of illness and, most important, its path through populations.
The startling setback stalled the CDC’s efforts to track the virus when it mattered most. By mid-February, the nation was testing only about 100 samples per day, according to the CDC’s website. But overnight, his mission — to manage 15,000 employees in a culture defined by precision and caution — was upended. A pathogen that Trump would later call the “invisible enemy” was hurtling toward the U.S. It would fall to the newly arrived Hahn to help build a huge national capacity for testing by academic and private labs.
Around noon on Feb. 27, Hahn, Redfield and top aides from the FDA and HHS dialed in to a conference call. Harrison began with an ultimatum: No one leaves until we resolve the lag in testing. We don’t have answers and we need them, one senior administration official recalled him saying. Get it done.
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