A recent flurry of cancellations designed to slow the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the United States will present “only a speed bump” to the disease, according to a prominent epidemiologist.
“The COVID pandemic is the most dangerous of my lifetime,” Larry Brilliant, chairman of the advisory board for Ending Pandemics, said on a Friday conference call. “Not as deadly as ebola, not as deadly as smallpox, not as transmissible as even measles or some influenzas … But it will, for all of us on this phone and all of the rest of us, cause global disruption on a scale we have not seen in more than 100 years.”
Brilliant aired that warning in the hours before President Trump is expected to declare a national emergency, which will allow federal authorities to shift resources more quickly to confront the pandemic. The president scheduled the press conference as several state school systems closed and private sector entities moved to scrap large gatherings, including the suspension of the NBA season and the cancellation of the NCAA basketball tournament.
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“Quarantine, isolation, closure of large events and small, prohibitions on travel … that social distancing is only a speed bump on the path of this virus until we have a vaccine,” Brilliant said on a Friday conference call.
Those social distancing tactics remain “vital” to slowing the outbreak to a pace that hospitals around the country can manage, Brilliant added, due to the limited number of beds available. And one of his colleagues emphasized that the public shouldn’t conclude from such pessimistic projections that there is no point in trying to contain the outbreak.
“My opinion is we are still in active containment mode,” Mark Smolinski, the president of Ending Pandemics, said on the call. “We need to contain every spark that’s happening from becoming the fires that we see in South Korea and we see in Italy. And we know we will have one or more here in the U.S. So, every community needs to take this absolutely seriously.”
A lack of coronavirus testing capability in the U.S. means that authorities in many cases are “going blind through an outbreak,” Smolinski added. CDC officials reportedly have estimated that coronavirus deaths could total 1.7 million people, but Smolinski thinks that such a forecast is flawed.
“Let’s not forget the egg on everybody’s face with the publication of the ebola [projections] in 2014 said that we would have a million deaths, and it was all based on modeling and forecasting,” he said. “It didn’t take into account that we’re not going to sit around and do nothing.”
The countermeasures will be felt around the country as the government and private sector get up to speed, Brilliant agreed.
“It is an unusual combination of infectivity and transmissibility,” Brilliant said. “And the speed at which it is moving that will cause disruption in every company, every nonprofit, every part of government, every facet of our life — every American will in some way be affected by it.”
