Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb sheds light on how COVID-19 came to be a pandemic and outlines ways to better prepare ourselves for future health crises. The book highlights the importance of timely and coordinated public health interventions to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
On January 18, 2020, the author, Scott Gottlieb, traded worried messages with Joe Grogan of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council. Both men were wondering about a new viral pneumonia outbreak in China, and both had previously worked at the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. Gottlieb, having worked there since 2003, had just stepped down as commissioner in April 2019.
In all those years, Gottlieb had tracked various SARS, MERS, Ebola, and Zika outbreaks. Some hit close to home, while others kept their distance. But on January 18, Gottlieb let Grogan know that he wasn’t so sure about the outbreak they were currently facing.
Truth be told, he was worried.
The key message here is: Early information on the COVID-19 outbreak was hard to come by.
One of the first red flags that Gottlieb noticed was that the information coming out of China was unreliable. The number of infected patients was hard to pin down, as was the question of whether this virus was capable of spreading person-to-person. Both China and the WHO – that is, the World Health Organization – were sticking to the claim that the outbreak had only infected people who’d been exposed to a particular zoonotic source at an outdoor food market in the city of Wuhan. In other words, they were suggesting that people had caught the virus directly from an animal.
But the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, the CDC, was already picking up evidence that the virus was spreading among these people’s family members and infecting others who hadn’t gone anywhere near the food market. Gottlieb wasn’t surprised at China’s withholding of information. In 2005, the Chinese government had tried to hide the SARS-1 outbreak from the world at large, as well as its own people.
Now, it seemed, it was doing it again. In mid-December, multiple people had shown up at hospitals throughout Wuhan with mysterious and aggressive pneumonia-like symptoms. Unable to identify the cause, doctors sent lung fluid samples out for genomic sequencing analysis.
One of the first results came back on December 27. Confirmation: this was a new respiratory virus, one that looked a lot like SARS-1, which had killed around 800 people worldwide. The news was cause for concern, but rather than raise the alarm, Beijing’s National Health Commission instead ordered that all sequencing data be kept secret.
Weeks later, China and the WHO continued to minimize the threat, repeating the claim that there was “no clear evidence” of person-to-person transmission.
Uncontrolled Spread (2021) takes an unsparing look at the many problems the United States faced when confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Through a combination of factors, the US was unprepared for what occurred. But it’s possible to learn from this tragedy and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
