The Time for Containment Is Over. Welcome to the Next Phase of Coronavirus

There comes a point in the unfolding of every epidemic when public-health officials acknowledge that despite their best efforts, an invisible microbial foe has managed to outwit them. That time has come. As cases of COVID-19 began to wane in early March in China, there was a surge in new infections around the globe, from Iran to Italy, South Korea to the U.S. Deaths also rose—the U.S. recorded its first coronavirus-related mortalities—and health officials warned that the disease has “pandemic potential.” There are now more than 80,000 cases of COVID-19 infection in mainland China and nearly 13,000 outside the country, with the latter tally growing daily. When the Chinese government took the unprecedented steps of quarantining first the city of Wuhan, where COVID-19 emerged, and then 60 million people living in the province of Hubei, where Wuhan is located, the hope was to contain the virus. If the people most likely to have been exposed to and infected by the virus couldn’t travel, then they couldn’t spread the disease very far. That was also President Donald Trump’s public reasoning for the aggressive travel restrictions the U.S. government put in place in January, denying entry to many foreign nationals from China, and funneling passengers arriving in the U.S. who might have traveled to China through select airports where they had their temperature scanned and then, for those with a fever, on to further testing and monitoring. But ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 UnitedWeRise20Disaster Source Type: news