For the better part of two months, they’d repeated the same mantra: the risk to Americans is low, and there is no evidence of transmission inside the country. That fiction ended on February 25, when the CDC’s lab in Atlanta identified as positive for COVID-19 the patient inside the UC Davis Medical Center with no history of foreign travel. That day, the CDC’s Nancy Messonnier held a press conference to say that the spread of the disease was inevitable. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore,” she said, “but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how
...more
