The months of magical thinking: As the coronavirus swept over China, some experts were in denial
The response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and other countries has been hobbled by a host of factors, many involving political and regulatory officials. Resistance to social distancing measures, testing debacles, and longtime failures to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic all played a role.
But a subtler, less-recognized factor contributed to the wasting of precious weeks in January and February, when preparations to try to stop the virus should have kicked immediately into high gear.
Magical thinking — you could call it denial — hampered the ability of even some of the most seasoned infectious diseases experts to recognize the full threat of what was bearing down on the world.
As China was seeking to rid itself of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a number of leading infectious diseases scientists mused that the outbreak would be controlled or might burn itself out. Yes, there were cases outside China — just over 100 had been reported to the World Health Organization by Jan. 31 — but they were spread out in relatively small numbers in 19 countries. The virus, the thinking went, didn’t appear to be behaving as explosively outside of China as it had inside it.
In hindsight, that argument, from a biological point of view, didn’t make any sense — and it ignored a soon-to-be-apparent Epidemiology 101 lesson: It takes time for a virus that spreads from person to person to hit an exponential growth phase in transmission, even if every new case was infecting on average two to three other people.
It wasn’t that the virus was behaving differently; we simply hadn’t yet seen what it was doing as it moved beyond China. When large outbreaks exploded in Iran and then Northern Italy in late February, the reality became abundantly evident. And then it was too late.
“Everybody was in denial of this coming, including the U.S. And everybody got hit — just as simple as that,” Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec, told STAT. [Continue reading…]