Thousands arriving from China and Europe at U.S. airports have faced no coronavirus screeningIn the weeks before President Donald Trump spoke from the Oval Office this week to announce restrictions on travelers from more than two dozen countries in Europe, thousands of people from the region already had stepped off planes at U.S. airports, and an untold number of them may have carried the coronavirus.
The same can be said of flights from China in the weeks before the U.S. clamped down on those. Thousands who visited the country where the illness began had entered the United States without any kind of health review.
Such sobering realities highlight just one element of the federal government’s shortcomings in getting ahead of the virus and halting its spread from overseas travelers.
A day-by-day review of the spread of an unfamiliar virus from its earliest days shows U.S. officials have often been slow to respond or steps behind, with critical gaps in containment measures such as travel restrictions and airport screenings that allowed the crisis to grow to more than 2,100 infections and 51 deaths.
“There have been gaps in the way the U.S. has approached its response, which has not been comprehensive enough to contain the virus at the early stages of the epidemic,” said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington.
That was evident from the very beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. On Jan. 15, a 35-year-old man returned home to Washington state through the Seattle airport after traveling to Wuhan, China, where the virus was already spreading. He would become the nation’s first known case. Shortly before, on Jan. 13, a woman in her 60s arrived home through the Chicago airport after traveling to Wuhan. She would be Chicago’s first known case.
Trump in the Oval Office.
Getty
Both of those travelers came to U.S. days before the federal government began screenings for passengers who traveled through Wuhan at three U.S. international airports, New York’s Kennedy, San Francisco and Los Angeles. That list was expanded on Jan. 21 to include hubs in Chicago and Atlanta. Seattle-Tacoma wouldn’t be added to the list until Jan. 28.
Also, there’s no guarantee those screenings — which involved passengers filling out health forms and having their temperatures taken — would have caught those early patients, who didn’t report symptoms until later. U.S. researchers say screenings may miss half of COVID-19 infected people, since they may not develop symptoms for several days.
By Jan. 24, both the Chicago woman and Washington state man had sought medical care after feeling sick, and tests confirmed they had the virus. Learning of the two early cases, public health workers scrambled to reach hundreds of people who may have been exposed to them on flights and on the ground, knowing they wouldn’t be able to find them all with certainty.
With infections in Wuhan multiplying at an alarming rate, the White House announced on Jan. 31 that non-residents who had recently been to mainland China would no longer be allowed entry.Americans returning from the Wuhan region would be subject to a mandatory two-week quarantine. In Boston, a man who would become the city’s first case had returned after traveling to Wuhan just days earlier.
By mid-February, cases in China had pushed past 44,000. But the threat still seemed low in the U.S. and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at its highest point ever amid investor optimism the trade wars initiated by Trump were being resolved.
Then on Feb. 24, a teenager at Jackson High School in Mill Creek, Washington, stayed home with fever, body aches and a headache. He was tested for flu at a clinic that week, but the test came back negative. Feeling better, he went to school on Feb. 28. Arriving on campus, he got a call to come home immediately. It was COVID-19.
The next day, Trevor Bedford, a Seattle scientist, tweeted about the “enormous implications” of finding genetic fingerprint similarities between the teenager’s virus and the Washington man who became the first known U.S. case. “This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks,” he wrote on Twitter.To some, containment still seemed like a possibility in the United States, which as recently as about two weeks ago had no deaths and just 60 known cases, mostly people who were under federal quarantine after being evacuated from China or a cruise ship in Japan.
“It may get a little bigger; it may not get bigger at all,” Trump said in a national TV address at the time.
With cases rising above 1,000 in Italy and 3,000 in South Korea, the White House announced on March 1 that U.S.-bound passengers would undergo screenings before leaving those countries. But travelers from Italy who would eventually test positive were already on their way.
On March 4, California health officials announced that three of its six new cases were people who had visited northern Italy. A day later, Illinois announced its fifth confirmed case — a man who had recently returned from Italy. A day after that, Oklahoma announced its first case — a man who had returned from Italy about two weeks earlier. And a few days later, the state announced its second case had also traveled to Italy.
By the time Trump announced the European travel ban Thursday, cases in the region including Italy, Spain and France had mushroomed to more than 17,000. When a similar ban was announced on people traveling from China, that country had around 11,000 cases. Iran had about 600 confirmed cases when the U.S. banned travelers who had recently been there.“The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hotspots,” Trump said. “As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.”
Saturday, Trump closed some glaring exceptions to his European travel ban, adding the United Kingdom and Ireland to the list and considering imposing travel restrictions within the U.S. as well. His decision came as deaths in Britain doubled from the day before to 21, and infections rose from 800 to over 1,100.
Some experts question the effectiveness of any kind of travel restrictions given the heavy volume of global travel. Last year, for example, 4.2 million passengers arrived in the U.S. on flights from China and 2.2 million from Italy.
Holes in the containment net may sound alarming to the general public, but experts in controlling outbreaks assume the net will let some slip through. The point is to slow down or “flatten” rates of infection to keep the number of severely sick patients from overwhelming hospitals, which aren’t big enough to accommodate a surge.
“We are essentially spreading this spread over a longer period of time to allow health systems time to adapt and respond,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist at Boston University.The benefit of stopping a portion of new infections from entering also depends on how aggressively officials are simultaneously controlling infections already within their borders, said Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
But nearly two months after the first U.S. case was confirmed, the persisting lack of testing capacity has left experts uncertain about how many more infected people aren’t being identified. Some researchers say the true count of infections in the U.S. may be upwards of 14,000..
“It is a failing, let’s admit it,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health on Thursday of the testing limitations.
Most people who get infected with the virus experience moderate symptoms. and the vast majority of people recover. Others, including older adults and people with existing health issues, can become severely sick.
Patricia Herrick, the daughter of an 89-year-old woman who died last week in the Seattle-area nursing home that has become ground zero of the U.S. outbreak with at least 25 deaths linked to it, said testing should have started much earlier so the sick could be separated from the well.
“We let this thing advance so far. We didn’t take this seriously enough,” said Herrick, whose mother was never tested for COVID-19. “I don’t know that she would still be living. ... It’s tragic.”
Kaiser’s Michaud acknowledged government health officials may have been “flying blind at first” but the inability to test and identify cases has put them behind.
“We’re trying to catch up. But we can’t catch up at this point.”
Breaking news: China will admit coronavirus coming from its P4 lab
Last updated on Feb 3, 2020: Miles Guo identified the Chinese scientist “Deyin Guo” to be the person who created the Wuhan Coronavirus. Wang Quishan, the vice present of China, ordered this attack. Now the Chinese Communist Party is blaming the U.S. for creating Wuhan coronavirus. Please click on the link below to read the last news.
The Chinese Communist Party will finally admit that the real source of the coronavirus is from “a lab in Wuhan” linked to its covert biological weapon programs.
As the “novel” coronavirus originated in Wuhan is spreading to ten countries, more and more people including international bio-weapon experts are questioning its link to the Wuhan P4 lab located about 20 miles from a seafood market where the first few cases of human infections were found.
A reliable source, one of the Chinese kleptocrats, told Miles Guo today that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will admit to the public of an “accidental” leak of lab-created virus from a P4 lab in Wuhan to put blames on “human errors”. But the official announcement is still being finalized.
Initially, the Chinese communist’s propaganda machines were blaming the virus on wild animals like bats by showing many videos of people eating bats.
(Please click here to view the bat-eating images which are too disturbing to be shown here. )
In January 2018, a bio-safety level four (BSL-4) laboratory was built in the city of Wuhan, which focuses on the control of emerging diseases and stores purified SARS and other types of viruses. It is supposed to act as a WHO ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world.
Here is a Chinese video of the P4 lab which took over ten years to build:
The remaining question is whether the Chinese Communist Party leaked the virus on purpose as a desperate attempt to stay in power. There is no final conclusion yet, but the Chinese Communist Party acted suspiciously before, during and after the first case of Wuhan pneumonia:
- Wang Qishan visited Wuhan secretly during the time of the first “sign” of the deadly virus.
- The Chinese top kleptocrats like Han Zheng did not respond to any early reports of the mysterious Wuhan pneumonia sent by the government of Hubei province.
- The Chinese government deliberately covered up and delayed the reporting and containment of the mysterious pneumonia.
- The Chinese kleptocrat Wang Qishan, the Vice President of China, told his friend confidently that the outbreak would end in February while the epidemic is spreading out of control.
- The Chinese government deliberately abandon the residents, patients and medical staff at the epicenter without providing food, medical supplies or protective gear.
- The Chinese top kleptocrats handle the outbreak with a nonchalant attitude. Instead of talking or acting in ways to show concerns, they were celebrating Chinese New Year as if nothing has happened.
- The Chinese government has not done a lot to reduce the spread of the disease except for sending military forces to prevent people from escaping their cities or villages on lockdown.
- The Chinese government allows the fear to spread nationally and internationally to create an almost doomsday-like scene.
- The Chinese government rejected aid, monitoring, donation or assistance from the WHO to keep the epidemic in a black box.
Please watch the following videos for Mr. Guo Wengui’s analysis of the communist party’s evil plot:
Please follow GNews for the latest updates on coronavirus epidemic and other news about China.
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