Biosecurity

'Rogue' Chinese Virologist Joins Twitter, Publishes "Smoking Gun" Evidence COVID-19 Created In Lab

...Much of the damage to the U.S.'s response to COVID-19 was done in the winter, when many infectious disease experts recognized that the disease had already escaped China and was spreading rapidly, says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

“That’s why you had an outbreak spiral out of control; it’s completely predictable with the wrong actions that were taken in January, February, and March that we ended up in this situation,” he says. With more rapid action, “You would have had a very different trajectory of this outbreak.”

The U.S. initially focused on screening people who had traveled from China and limited diagnostic testing to those who had recently visited China or had a fever or lower respiratory tract symptoms. This caused the country to overlook people with mild or asymptomatic illness and travelers who had been infected elsewhere; researchers have found that New York City’s catastrophic outbreak was primarily seeded by travelers from Europe.