Coronavirus: US outbreak now inevitable, leading American health official warns
- ‘It is not so much a question of if, but when,’ says Nancy Messonnier of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
- ‘Data over the last week has raised our expectation that we are going to have community spread here,’ she says
“We expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen any more, but the rather more correct question to be asking is, ‘When this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness?’” said Nancy Messonnier of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We will maintain, for as long as practical, a dual approach [in which] we continue measures to contain this disease but also employ strategies to minimise the impact on our communities,” said Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases.
“The data over the last week in the spread in other countries has certainly raised our level of concern and raised our level of expectation that we are going to have community spread here,” she said. “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.”
Messonnier said “non-pharmaceutical intervention” (NPI) measures such as school closures and other social distancing policies should be implemented only at the community level, stressing that these actions need not be applied uniformly across the United States.
“What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won’t necessarily be appropriate for a community with no local transmission,” she said.