The first official report of a person infected with coronavirus in the United States it was January 21. At that time, President Donald Trump he pointed that “everything was under control”. 60 days later, in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the country could become the new epicenter of the pandemic. And that was what happened.
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It took just eight weeks for the country to become the center of the pandemic. The explosion of cases can be explained in part by reports that came later on early and median deaths in February that were not then reported as covid-19. Autopsies made public in April revealed that the virus was the cause of the deaths.
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That seems to indicate that the virus was spreading ‘silently’, something that was possible because in those initial – and crucial – moments of the outbreak in the US there was a convergence of lack of tests to know who was infected and to isolate them to stop the virus from spreading and a disdain for the threat of the then incipient epidemic in the president’s speech. That may have led to the postponement of measures of social distancing as well.
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“We have so many cases because definitely the pandemic could have been contained a little more (at the beginning) if the tests had started earlier and also the social distancing”, points to Univision News Dr. José A. Vázquez, expert in infectious diseases at the University of Augusta, Georgia.
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The problem of tests
There was a three-week delay caused by problems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which failed to distribute tests to local laboratories in late January and early February.
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Diagnosis, contact tracing and isolation of the patient is essential to contain the spread of a disease, but it is impossible without a reliable test to assess suspected cases of infection.
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“This is key because if we find positive patients, they can be placed in isolation and quarantine. And so the transfer from person to person can be stopped,” Vázquez told Univision Noticias. “Much more considering that this virus generates in many infected very mild symptoms, such as colds or even lack of sense of taste or smell, so it is important to recognize these patients so that they do not continue to spread. Because not only the symptom is pneumonia “
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Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, declared the health emergency in the United States on February 4 and a regulation came into force that states that any laboratory that wants to test must comply with the Emergency Use Authorization (USA), from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Such regulation was imposed in 2009, (with the H1N1 flu outbreak) to prevent ineffective diagnoses from being offered.
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In the meantime, In the US by February 5, the CDC began distributing its own tests to local laboratories across the country. They wanted to be diagnosed locally because until then all tests were centralized at CDC in Atlanta, Georgia.
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But by February 12, Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, reports that local laboratories reported that the tests sent were failing. Shortly after, CDC goes back and says that until new reagents are produced, all covid-19 tests would continue to be centralized, leading to delays in results.
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On February 21, Messonnier told a press conference that the defects in the test kits had yet to be resolved. It was not until February 29 that the FDA issued a new guide that allowed any facility that had been certified to handle high-complexity tests to run its own covid-19 tests.
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Without testing, the virus travels ‘freely’
This initial failure of weeks of tests on the one hand gave a false impression that the number of infections in the country was low, as the virus traveled undetected throughout the United States.
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An example of this is the report of two known autopsies on April 22 showing that two Californians died of the coronavirus in early and mid-February, three weeks before the country’s first known death from the virus, reported on February 29 in Kirkland, Washington.
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That data seems to indicate that the first deaths in the US occurred earlier than previously thought and it seems to be a sign that the virus was spreading ‘silently’.
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“The first and only thing that was done in the US in January was the closure of flights with China and nothing else … in January and February, there were still doubts about whether there was a transfer from person to person and the ‘border was not closed’ “With Europe, then flights continued to come in,” Vazquez said, referring to Trump’s January 31 announcement that foreign citizens who have traveled to the Asian country in the past 14 days will be denied entry.
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“We now know that two different types of coronavirus entered here: one that came from China, which spread on the west coast, Washington, California and Oregon. And the other that came from Europe, which seems to be a much more aggressive strain, which is the one that spread in New York, Boston, New Jersey and the East Coast in general, “says the expert.
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By March 6, the President Trump was saying to the country that there would be coronavirus tests for anyone who asked for it. Shortly afterwards, the Health Secretary clarified that this would not be the case, that there should always be a doctor who would direct the patient to undergo the test.
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Trump and the vice president Mike Pence They have reiterated on numerous occasions that the United States is the country that has carried out the most tests in the world. So far (April 26) more than 5.1 million tests have been carried out in the country. And yes, it is true, but there are those who point out that perhaps they were not done in time.
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USA, the center of the pandemic
No other country so far has registered as many infections or as many deaths as the United States. By April 26, the death toll in the country reaches almost 55,000 and the contagions almost a million.
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This Monday, an analysis of The Washington Post and the Yale School of Public Health also shows another shocking fact: the excess number of deaths over the historical figure in the same period of time: “Between March and April 4, the US registered an estimated 15,400 excess deaths, almost double the number publicly attributed to covid-19 at the time. ” That surplus or part of it could eventually be attributed to the pandemic.
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Something that also explains the growth of infections in the United States is the simple mathematical factor: it has a large number of inhabitants, more than 350 million, which multiplies the chances that more people will become infected.
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“We are also the country that has done the most tests in the world. The more tests are done, the more cases of contagion are reported,” says Vázquez.
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This, added to the lack of information on the patients in those sensitive weeks of February, adds to the fact that the president publicly minimized the threat of the coronavirus for several weeks, something that could have delayed the implementation of social distancing measures in addition to generating in less a part of the public disdain for the severity of the outbreak.
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That is explained in part, according to experts in infectious diseases, not only in the failures in the tests but in the lack of early measures. “In addition to the problems that there were at the beginning with the virus tests, which were necessary and took a long time … to start distancing ourselves from the beginning” would have helped, says Vázquez. “Here the movement of those two things, testing and distancing, started late.”
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