Health official says US missed some chances to slow virus(有些中文媒体断章取义，

(有些中文媒体断章取义，贴原文供参考。）

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. government was slow to understand how much coronavirus was spreading from Europe, which helped drive the acceleration of outbreaks across the nation, a top health official said Friday.

Limited testing and delayed travel alerts for areas outside China contributed to the jump in U.S. cases starting in late February, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We clearly didn’t recognize the full importations that were happening,” Schuchat told The Associated Press.

The coronavirus was first reported late last year in China, the initial epicenter of the global pandemic. But the U.S. has since become the hardest-hit nation, with about a third of the world's reported cases and more than a quarter of the deaths.

But she also noted there was an evolving public understanding of just how bad things were, as well as a change in what kind of measures — including stay-at-home orders — people were willing to accept.

“I think that people's willingness to accept the mitigation is unfortunately greater once they see the harm the virus can do," she said. “There will be debates about should we have started much sooner, or did we go too far too fast."

Schuchat’s article still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, said Dr. Howard Markel, a public health historian at the University of Michigan.

It doesn’t reveal what kind of proposals were made, and perhaps ignored, during the critical period before U.S. cases began to take off in late February, he said.

“I want to know ... the conversations, the memos the presidential edicts," said Markel, who's written history books on past pandemics. “Because I still believe this did not need to be as bad as it turned out.”

但是这是她在Feb 11, 2020 所说的话，大家参考。

WASHINGTON DC—The novel coronavirus that has prompted health emergency declarations around the world appears to be spreading much faster than SARS did, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said.

But at the same time, the virus may turn out to be less severe than the virus known as SARS, which prompted similar global pandemic fears in 2003, CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat said while speaking at the National Press Club on Tuesday.  

SARS had a mortality rate of around 10% among patients that contracted the illness, she said. Meanwhile, preliminary data from China indicates the coronavirus may have closer to just over a 2% mortality rate.

The overall mortality based on the number of people around the world who have contracted the virus is much lower, although wider scale assessments still need to be completed, she said. 

She recommended providers remain vigilant while reiterating the risk of coronavirus is still low in the U.S.

"Anything that's novel can be scary before we know a lot about it," Schuchat said pointing to other illnesses such as the Zika virus. "People that have a runny nose or a fever are much more likely to have a normal kind of respiratory virus right now. Now, if you're presenting after travel to the Hubei province or from China, we want travelers to have their alert up and to let their clinicians know 'I was recently traveling.' They may need special evaluation. Clinicians may need to take special precautions."

The outbreak has infected more than 42,000 people resulting in just more than 1,000 deaths as of Tuesday morning, officials said. A total of 13 cases of the virus have been identified in the U.S., she said. The first charter flight of U.S. citizens that were evacuated from China after the outbreak was identified have reached the 14th day of their quarantine and will be released following an evaluation, she said.

Emphasizing a strategy of delaying the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., she was among top federal officials urging health professionals to "follow the playbook for their infectious disease response."

"The immediate risk to the American public at this time is low, and we are acting swiftly to keep that risk low," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said during a speech at an event focused on health data. "But, I want to emphasize, the situation has the potential to change very quickly, and we are constantly preparing mitigation strategies that would be necessary if the situation does change."

In the meantime, officials are increasing testing capability to determine if patients are infected with the virus. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization for a diagnostic test that was rapidly developed by the CDC. The test kits are available for order by U.S. state and local public health laboratories, Department of Defense laboratories, and select international laboratories.

Officials are also working to find ways to treat and prevent coronavirus. Officials said the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has been expanding its work with a drug company around a therapeutic drug candidate for the coronavirus and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is working on a potential vaccine with private sector partners. 

They said the FDA is also working to accelerate the development of those countermeasures and assess the risks that the outbreak could present to American medical supply chains that relay on  manufacturers in China.