We didn’t appreciate that until late February.” The first mistake had been made, and the second was soon to happen. “You’re going to be missing fifty per cent of the cases. “That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,” Redfield told me recently.
The virus in Wuhan turned out to be far more infectious, and it spread largely by asymptomatic transmission.
The new pathogen was a coronavirus, and as such it was thought to be only modestly contagious, like its cousin the SARS virus. specialists visited China in early January, they would have learned exactly what the world was facing.
Certainly, Redfield didn’t know that the virus was already present in California, Oregon, and Washington, and would be spreading in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut, Michigan, and Rhode Island within the next two weeks-well before America’s first official case was detected. Perhaps Gao had just been made aware that the virus had been circulating in China at least since November. Lawrence Wright on how the pandemic response went wrong.
