There was a CDC briefing on 26 February which the presenter noted:
Thank you. And our final question comes from Ben from CNN. Your line is now open.
Hi, thanks so much for taking my question. This morning while he was traveling in India, President Trump said that he thinks that the coronavirus is a problem that is going to go away. He seems very optimistic about this and we’re trying to figure out exactly why he believes so strongly that to be the case. And so my question for you is what information is your agency specifically giving the president and the White House about the current state of the coronavirus outbreak?
As you imagine, we brief the Secretary daily and the Secretary is the lead of the White House task force. And Ddr. Redfield the CDC director is briefing them daily. In terms of the course of this illness, we have a — again, a team of mathematical modelers working with us to try to predict the trajectory. One hypothesis is that we could be hopeful that this could potentially be seasonal. Other viral respiratory diseases are seasonal including influenza and therefore in many viral respiratory diseases, we do see a decrease in disease in spring and summer. And so we could certainly be optimistic that this disease will follow suit. But we’re not going to know that until time keeps ticking forward. We’re going to be, again, preparing as if this is going to continue, preparing as if we’re going to see community spread in the near term. But I’m always going to be hopeful that that disease will decline either for the summer or that, you know, we’ll be over-prepared and we won’t see the high levels of transmission here in the U.S.
Namely they had no clue despite the 29 January NEJM warnings. Furthermore we note the chaos on the "test kits". Namely:
Thank you. I had a couple questions. One is if a dozen states have the kit, then do they still need to send those tests to CDC for confirmation? Which are the states that have the tests? And more broadly, your comments today seem to represent a significant escalation in the sort of severity and urgency of the now. At a briefing this morning for Congress, I believe some members were told that we now face a very strong chance of an extremely serious outbreak. Is that the CDC’s feeling right now that we face an extremely strong chance of a serious outbreak?
Okay. So let’s see. The first question, it’s 12 state or local health departments. And so it’s not 12 states total. We are still as a point of part of how we roll out these tests, those tests that are positive still do come to CDC for confirmation. I think that’s just part of a normal process to ensure we are keeping to the utmost quality control. I don’t have a list of state or local health departments in front of me, but I think we can provide that. In terms of a change in tone, I guess what I would say is as I look back on the scripts of the telebriefings that we’ve given over the past month, we have for a long time been saying — we have for many weeks been saying that while we hope this is not going to be severe, we are planning as if it is. The data over the last week and the spread in other countries has certainly raised our level of concern and raised our level of expectation that we are going to have community spread here. So I think that that’s perhaps the change of tone you’ve seen. I think what we still don’t know is what that will look like as many of you know. We can have community spread in the united states and have it be reasonably mild. We could have community spread in the united states and have it be very severe. And so that is what — that is what we don’t completely know yet. And we certainly also don’t exactly know when it’s going to happen. I think it would be nice for everybody if we could say, you know, on this date is when it’s going to start. We don’t know that yet. And so that’s why we’re asking folks in every sector as well as people within their families to start planning for this because as we’ve seen from the recent countries that have had community spread when it is hit in those countries, it has moved quite rapidly. So we want to make sure that the American public is prepared.
This is what the CDC was telling their management who then filtered it to the White House. The Press was on top of this yet they seem to have forgotten what the record states.
If there is blame, it starts in the belly of the CDC. I noted this back then and noted the gross incompetence. After all, on 4 February I saw a Pandemic coming ashore, it was published just a few days before. So where was the Wizard from Brooklyn then?
Posts
