April 22, 2020

As the coronavirus swept over China

As the coronavirus swept over China

The response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and other countries has been hobbled by a host of factors, many involving political and regulatory officials. Resistance to social distancing measures, testing debacles, and longtime failures to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic all played a role.To get more China breaking news, you can visit shine news official website.

But a subtler, less-recognized factor contributed to the wasting of precious weeks in January and February, when preparations to try to stop the virus should have kicked immediately into high gear.

Magical thinking — you could call it denial — hampered the ability of even some of the most seasoned infectious diseases experts to recognize the full threat of what was bearing down on the world.As China was seeking to rid itself of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a number of leading infectious diseases scientists mused that the outbreak would be controlled or might burn itself out. Yes, there were cases outside China — just over 100 had been reported to the World Health Organization by Jan. 31 — but they were spread out in relatively small numbers in 19 countries. The virus, the thinking went, didn’t appear to be behaving as explosively outside of China as it had inside it.

In hindsight, that argument, from a biological point of view, didn’t make any sense — and it ignored a soon-to-be-apparent Epidemiology 101 lesson: It takes time for a virus that spreads from person to person to hit an exponential growth phase in transmission, even if every new case was infecting on average two to three other people.It wasn’t that the virus was behaving differently; we simply hadn’t yet seen what it was doing as it moved beyond China. When large outbreaks exploded in Iran and then Northern Italy in late February, the reality became abundantly evident. And then it was too late.

"Everybody was in denial of this coming, including the U.S. And everybody got hit — just as simple as that,” Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec, told STAT.

Kobinger himself thought the WHO’s immediate move to a war footing on the virus — the day after China made its first official report on it on Dec. 31 — was probably an overreaction. The rapid rise in cases in the city of Wuhan brought him around.

"After that I changed my mind and I said, ‘No, this is not an overreaction. This is what we need,'” said Kobinger, who is on an expert committee that advises WHO’s health emergencies program.

It’s not that infectious disease experts didn’t take notice of what was happening. When something that might be a new infectious disease emerges from China, spines tend to stiffen in this community. China has a track record of being a source of some scary new infections — SARS in 2002-2003; H5N1 bird flu, for about a dozen years starting from 2004; and H7N9 bird flu, from 2013 to 2018. And yet the immediate reaction this time was, perhaps, fairly cautious.

On Jan. 5, a day after STAT published its first story on what would become the novel coronavirus, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me he didn’t think the new outbreak would turn into a pandemic.

At that point Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, was reporting 59 cases. The disease didn’t yet have a name. It would be three more days until China even announced the cause was a new coronavirus, and five days until it posted the genetic sequence of the virus in a global database.

Osterholm, co-author of the 2017 book "Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs,” thought China was going to get a handle on whatever was responsible for the outbreak. Even if the cause was a new coronavirus — as was rumored from the first emerging word of the outbreak — the world had experience controlling coronavirus outbreaks. The SARS virus had been vanquished, and MERS, a related camel virus that causes sporadic human cases on the Arabian Peninsula, had never spread widely beyond it, except for one outbreak in South Korea in 2015.

Within days, Osterholm’s thinking shifted. By Jan. 20, he was warning the 3M Company — which makes N95 respirators — that the virus, in his opinion, would cause a pandemic. The company immediately moved to increase production.

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