The U.S. government has gone on the offensive as the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, multiplies and spreads to other countries and has more options at its disposal.
Roughly 9,800 people in China have been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 200 have died. In response, the United States imposed strict travel restrictions, declared a public health emergency, sent scientists to China, got word out to hospitals, started working on a vaccine, and screened passengers at airports. So far, only seven people in the U.S. have been infected, but on Friday, the administration took the unprecedented move of telling 195 citizens evacuated from Wuhan that they couldn’t leave a military base for 14 days.
“While we recognize this is an unprecedented action, we are facing an unprecedented public health threat,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “This is one of the tools in our toolbox to mitigate the potential impact of this novel virus on the United States.”
In the days ahead, the administration has several other tools it could pull out to keep the virus from spreading here and abroad.
Beef up the team. President Trump assembled a 12-person task force this week to lead the fight against the coronavirus. At the helm is Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who oversaw efforts against SARS and anthrax when he was part of the George W. Bush administration. Also on the panel is Dr. Tony Fauci, who has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency that oversees vaccine development, since the 1980s.
“You have the most experienced team in the world on this — prepared on this,” Azar said this week.
The task force that the Trump administration assembled includes top agency leaders ranging from the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security. But it did not include anyone from the Department of Defense, which surprised Josh Michaud, a former DOD epidemiologist who is now associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“If this becomes a widespread epidemic, then the Department of Defense might be called upon,” for tasks such as mass transport, Michaud said. “It would be a good idea if they were involved in these conversations at the start so they aren’t injected later on.”
Amid the spread of the disease, Democrats criticized the Trump administration for not having a pandemics expert on his National Security Council. The administration has also faced questions concerning whether it will appoint someone who isn’t also in the role of leading an agency to oversee and coordinate the different work underway.
Azar said this week that the president won’t be appointing a so-called “coronavirus czar,” indicating that the people already put in charge were adequately equipped to work together. Dr. Tom Frieden, president of Resolve to Save Lives, a public health group, said that when he was head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Barack Obama, it was helpful for the president to appoint Ronald Klain, then dubbed the “Ebola czar,” to coordinate different agencies.
“He didn’t try to meddle in technical decisions, he just facilitated the work,” Frieden said.
Get help from Congress. The State of the Union address Tuesday gives Trump an opportunity to call on Congress for help in fighting the coronavirus. He could call for boosting spending for emergency funds or for health agencies — even though doing so would be a departure from his previous budgets calling for cuts.
Congress isn’t waiting for Trump. A House panel is holding a hearing involving agency officials and public health experts Wednesday. And Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, is reintroducing a bill that would boost public health emergency funds by $5 billion, an amount also meant to help other countries fight the virus.
The latest spending bill provided $2.6 billion for the public health emergency fund. The idea of increasing that amount is to have funding ready to go so that politics won’t get in the way, as it did during the Zika outbreak.
“There is certainly the need for more resources, that includes departments across the U.S., research that needs to be done, but more than anything else it includes support for countries around the world so they are better at preventing health threats,” Frieden said.
Adjust controls on travel. It’s not clear yet how many more people the U.S. government will bring back from China, but it will be imposing a 14-day quarantine on all citizens who try to return and will deny entrance to foreign nationals. As of Thursday, the government told people not to travel to China at all, soon after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency.
Frieden called the decision to quarantine the initial 195 passengers “understandable” but said officials should keep reevaluating their actions.
“We have so much we don’t yet know about this infection,” he said. “We don’t know what portion of people have serious illness. We don’t know how infectious it is. … At the same time, it’s important that we adjust our actions day by day as we learn more to avoid over- or underreaction.”
The Trump administration said its restrictions were not a “ban” and that they would only be temporary. Strict travel restrictions go against the advice of international leaders, who worry that countries won’t report cases out of fear of being frozen out on the global stage, making the problem worse.
“There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement,” WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said this week.
Officials worry that health workers will have trouble traveling in and out to help with the fight against coronavirus.
“There is a balance between the risk posed by this virus and the economic and social impacts of completely banning travel,” said Michaud of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
