The battle to keep covid-19 from becoming established in the United States is probably over without a single shot being fired. We were not outwitted, outpaced or outflanked. We knew what was coming. We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in.
The first thing officials need when responding to an infectious disease is a way to test for it — a way to tell who has it and who is at risk.
Dozens of such test procedures have been produced in the scant weeks since covid-19 announced itself to the world by shutting down Wuhan, China, a city the size of New York. Public health agencies around the globe have generated huge amounts of data on how well these tests work and have rolled them out on a massive scale. South Korea alone has tested more than 100,000 of its citizens.
But the United States has lagged far behind the rest of the world in testing for the
new coronavirus. As a result, outbreaks here are likely to be more numerous and more difficult to control than they would have been otherwise. I research infectious disease and how to fight it, so I know how important it is to detect outbreaks early. The covid-19 outbreak is the largest acute infectious-disease emergency most of us have experienced. And we may have let it go undetected here for too long.
Once infection starts spreading — as it
clearly has in the United States, even though we haven’t been testing enough people to turn up a large number of cases — the virus has an expanding pool of potential hosts. As the numbers of infected people climb, it is ever harder to stop them before they fatefully
join their family for dinner, head to work at a
toy store or
go to a soccer match.
If you don’t diagnose the disease, it doesn’t go away. It keeps being transmitted without being noticed, and a thousand little fires spark. If we don’t start aggressively testing mild illness and contacts of contacts, we will lose all track of them. Bruce Aylward, leader of the joint World Health Organization China mission, put it bluntly: “
It’s all about the speed.” We’re in a race with the virus, and if it wins, we only get more contacts to chase in an ever-growing chain reaction.
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