(6 Mar 2020) The former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday warned the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. will "get worse before it gets better."
"We're going to see many more chains of transmission in the U.S.," Dr. Tom Frieden told the Associated Press.
He pointed out there is still a lot of unknowns to COVID-19.
"We don't yet know how that's going to play out. We don't know how many. We don't know how widely it'll spread. We don't know whether we'll be able to contain it. We still don't know fundamentally either how infectious this virus is or how deadly it is or what the most effective ways to tamp down are," said Frieden.
The former CDC chief and current president of Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit that works to prevent epidemics, said there are also questions about the transmission of the disease.
"We still don't know, for example, how important are contaminated surfaces? Is that a major way this is spreading or not?" said Frieden.
The U.S. has trailed other countries in rolling out tests, because of problems with its test kits and because the CDC initially limited the number of eligible people.
"In the past with H1N1 and Zika and other diseases C.D.C. was able to rapidly get accurate high quality test kits out to every state in the U.S. and every country in the world, more than 100 countries around the world. We need to find out what went wrong and prevent that from going wrong in the future," Frieden said.
Frieden is more optimistic about finding a treatment than a vaccine for the coronavirus calling treatment a "game changer."
"We would be able to reduce the burden on intensive care units. And we might have a preventive treatment that could be given to contacts of people with the disease. And we could know within weeks or months if any of the treatments are effective," said Frieden.
Frieden said it is extremely important to do "rigorous, meticulous scientific studies" to figure out whether there's a treatment that works.
"A vaccine will be a year, year and a half at the best," said Frieden. "And success is far from certain."
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