'In some cases, government officials appeared to be learning about developments for first time from the Red Dawn emails. In one exchange, Eva Lee, the director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare at Georgia Tech, flagged a study showing a 20-year-old woman left Wuhan with no symptoms and had infected five family members.
'Dr. Robert Kadlec, the Trump administration’s Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, appeared surprised. “Eva is this true?!” Kadlec replied. “If so, we have a huge [hole] on our screening and quarantine effort.”'
Anyone carefully following the news about coronavirus knew there already were confirmed reports of asymptomatic spread by air travelers before the end of Jan: to Japan, Washington State, and Germany, but a week before Feb ended the Trump administration and many US health authorities were still clueless about them.
And then this curious story about the 20-yr old Wuhan woman came out on Feb 21/22, long after the fact refocusing attention on the issue of asymptomatic spread, curious mostly because she infected others far away from Wuhan around Jan 10 but a month later was herself still symptom-free.
But did it do anything to get the feds to move? Obviously not.
It took another almost four weeks from Feb 22 before the US instituted the half-hearted stay-at-home advisory, triggered mostly by community spread in Washington State. And air travelers didn't abandon flying until after Mar 15, when they finally realized the feds were taking the epidemic sort of seriously and the threat was real.
Meanwhile the disease is obviously still spreading asymptomatically in the United States like wildfire, and the feds are doing . . . what exactly to stop it? The weakness and incompetence the Trump administration has shown have only encouraged the nay-sayers to masks and social distancing.
The stay-at-home period should have been used to mobilize production of adequate masks for the population and to prepare schools to social distance, at a minimum, but now we're at war over both of those, too.
Sad!
Reuters had the Wuhan woman story on Feb 22 and it was picked up immediately by The Straits Times in Singapore:
Wuhan woman with no symptoms infected five relatives with coronavirus: Study:
"A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, travelled 675km north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday (Feb 21), offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically."
Anyone carefully following the news about coronavirus knew there already were confirmed reports of asymptomatic spread by air travelers before the end of Jan: to Japan, Washington State, and Germany, but a week before Feb ended the Trump administration and many US health authorities were still clueless about them.
And then this curious story about the 20-yr old Wuhan woman came out on Feb 21/22, long after the fact refocusing attention on the issue of asymptomatic spread, curious mostly because she infected others far away from Wuhan around Jan 10 but a month later was herself still symptom-free.
But did it do anything to get the feds to move? Obviously not.
It took another almost four weeks from Feb 22 before the US instituted the half-hearted stay-at-home advisory, triggered mostly by community spread in Washington State. And air travelers didn't abandon flying until after Mar 15, when they finally realized the feds were taking the epidemic sort of seriously and the threat was real.
Meanwhile the disease is obviously still spreading asymptomatically in the United States like wildfire, and the feds are doing . . . what exactly to stop it? The weakness and incompetence the Trump administration has shown have only encouraged the nay-sayers to masks and social distancing.
The stay-at-home period should have been used to mobilize production of adequate masks for the population and to prepare schools to social distance, at a minimum, but now we're at war over both of those, too.
Sad!
Reuters had the Wuhan woman story on Feb 22 and it was picked up immediately by The Straits Times in Singapore:
Wuhan woman with no symptoms infected five relatives with coronavirus: Study:
"A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, travelled 675km north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday (Feb 21), offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically."
