Too late to turn back a coronavirus pandemic?
US health official warns of ‘severe’ disruptions
A federal health official warned Tuesday that the deadly coronavirus could cause “severe” disruptions in the U.S. as global experts struggled to fend off the outbreak and avoid a pandemic.
But is it too late?
“Disruption to everyday life may be severe” in the U.S., Nancy Messonnier, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned Tuesday. Schools in some areas could be forced to close and businesses shuttered.
Messonnier said the coronavirus already has caused sickness and death, and it has sustained person-to-person transmission. Those are two of the three factors for a pandemic, she said.
“As community spread is detected in more and more countries, the world moves closer to meeting the third criteria – worldwide spread of the new virus,” Messonnier said.
Although the World Health Organization as recently as Monday determined that the term pandemic “did not fit the facts,” experts say it soon could.
Dennis Carroll, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Global Health Security and Development Unit, credited China’s “extraordinary control measures” with delaying the spread of the virus. But he said avoiding a pandemic is “very unlikely.”
“The dramatic uptick of cases in South Korea, Iran and Italy are reflective of a self-sustaining spreading of the virus,” said Carroll, who leads the Global Virome Project science cooperative. “And a clear message that the horse is out of the barn.”
Melissa Nolan, a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, also cited the new clusters in Iran, now facing at least 95 cases and 16 deaths, and Italy, with 322 cases.
“If we continue to see focalized local transmission in areas outside of China, the WHO will need to reconvene,” Nolan said. “We are very close to seeing this virus becoming a pandemic.”
Nolan said responses to the outbreaks in Iran and Italy could help health officials in other countries prepare their own medical and quarantine policies ahead of an outbreak. That is crucial, said Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital, who said the world is on the “cusp” of pandemic.
“Trying to contain a disease which spreads like influenza, in this case COVID-19, is almost impossible,” he said. “We are talking about rapid-fire and sustained transmission.”
That means redirecting the focus from containment measures to preparing for treatment of big numbers of sick patients with antivirals while continuing the effort to develop an effective vaccine, he said.
Beyond an epidemic, which involves a defined region, a pandemic has global impact.