[FD]

Testing for the coronavirus might have stopped it. Now it’s too late.
The disease spread unchecked in the United States because we didn’t look for it.

By William Hanage

William Hanage is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

March 6, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. PST

The battle to keep covid-19 from becoming established in the United States is probably over without a single shot being fired. We were not outwitted, outpaced or outflanked. We knew what was coming. We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in.

The first thing officials need when responding to an infectious disease is a way to test for it — a way to tell who has it and who is at risk. Dozens of such test procedures have been produced in the scant weeks since covid-19 announced itself to the world by shutting down Wuhan, China, a city the size of New York. Public health agencies around the globe have generated huge amounts of data on how well these tests work and have rolled them out on a massive scale. South Korea alone has tested more than 100,000 of its citizens.

But the United States has lagged far behind the rest of the world in testing for the new coronavirus. As a result, outbreaks here are likely to be more numerous and more difficult to control than they would have been otherwise. I research infectious disease and how to fight it, so I know how important it is to detect outbreaks early. The covid-19 outbreak is the largest acute infectious-disease emergency most of us have experienced. And we may have let it go undetected here for too long.

For countries that are lucky enough so far to have been spared large covid-19 outbreaks, the way to handle the virus is simple: Strangle it at birth. If you detect it while there are still just a handful of cases, it is comparatively easy to chase down the contacts of the people who have it, isolate them quickly and halt transmission. If that fails, stopping transmission might take measures like the draconian restrictions imposed in China, which — while apparently successful — we should wish to avoid.

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