A Democratic congressman called on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin updating its coronavirus tracking website on the weekend, not just on weekdays.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, sent a letter on Wednesday to Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, telling him that the “spread of COVID-19 does not pause for the weekend, and neither should the reporting of essential public health data to maintain public understanding and confidence.”
The Democrat said, “In light of the rising number of U.S. cases” of the coronavirus, “I urge you to update daily — including on Saturdays and Sundays — the numbers of U.S. cases” on the CDC website.
“We are in the midst of a public health emergency with this pandemic,” Raskin said. “Accurate and up-to-date public reporting of this data is critical to our public health efforts to effectively minimize the spread, and mitigate the consequences, of COVID-19.”
The CDC did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
The CDC’s website says, “This page will be updated regularly at noon Mondays through Fridays” and that “numbers close out at 4 p.m. the day before reporting.”
Two weeks ago, the number of confirmed cases in the United States, as stated by President Trump, was 15, based on CDC’s count. That number rose to 158 one week ago and approached 1,000 on Wednesday.
The CDC site currently states that there are 938 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. and 29 deaths attributable to the disease. But Johns Hopkins University’s tracker shows higher figures, stating there are currently 1,135 cases and 32 confirmed deaths in the U.S.
The CDC’s Redfield told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, “This is a new virus, and many uncertainties remain.”
“Absence of immunity and treatment, our nation’s public health response has relied on traditional public health activity: early diagnosis, case isolation, contact tracing, and targeted mitigation to slow the emergence of this virus in the United States,” Redfield testified.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the committee, “Bottom line: It’s going to get worse,” and, “If we don’t do very serious mitigation now, what’s going to happen is we’re going to be weeks behind.”
“I mean, people always say, ‘Well, the flu does this, the flu does that.’ … The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1% — this has a mortality rate of 10 times that,” Fauci said. “That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”
The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a “pandemic” on Wednesday.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the WHO, emphasized that “describing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO’s assessment of the threat posed by this coronavirus” and that “it doesn’t change what WHO is doing, and it doesn’t change what countries should do.”
“This is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus,” Ghebreyesus said. “We cannot say this loudly enough or clearly enough or often enough: All countries can still change the course of this pandemic. This is the first pandemic that can be controlled.”
There are more than 118,000 coronavirus cases and 4,292 confirmed deaths worldwide, according to the WHO, with more than 80,000 confirmed cases in China, approximately 10,000 cases in Italy, 8,000 cases in Iran, and 7,700 cases in South Korea.
The coronavirus is believed to have originated in the city of Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province. Both China and Russia have been spreading disinformation about the virus.
Public events across the U.S. have been canceled in response to the spread of the virus, and a growing number of schools have been closed as U.S. officials seek to stem the virus’s spread.
The stock market plunged into a bear market this week amid concerns about the coronavirus’s effect on the global economy.
Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said on Wednesday that “this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up” and that “it probably cost the world community two months.”
O’Brien said that “if we’d had those [two months] and been able to sequence the virus and had the cooperation necessary from the Chinese, had a WHO team been on the ground, had a CDC team, which we’d offered, been on the ground, I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what’s now happening across the world.”
