During an interview broadcast on Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that without China’s “delay in transparency” on the coronavirus, “other countries would have maybe been more quick on the trigger to try and inhibit travel from China to their country.” Fauci also stated that nothing “would have prevented the spread of this virus.”
Fauci stated that in “early January…it became clear that what the Chinese had claimed originally, that this was just a virus that jumped from an animal reservoir to a human, and wasn’t being transmitted from human to human, well, it became very clear pretty quickly that that was not the case. … And when the numbers started coming in as to what the morbidity and the mortality was, it was during that period in early to mid-January that it became clear to me that this was not just another SARS, it wasn’t another MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.”
He added, “I don’t think anything would have prevented the spread of this virus. Once it emerged into society, with its capability of efficient spread and morbidity and mortality, that was it. But what could have been different…is that, if we had known that this was highly transmissible early on, when it was just in China, I think other countries would have maybe been more quick on the trigger to try and inhibit travel from China to their country. … So, that delay in transparency, I think, likely had an impact on what I just said, the awareness that this could seed the rest of the world.”
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