The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

America would have three distinct opportunities to curb the Covid contagion before it got out of hand. The first was lost when the Chinese rejected U.S. offers to send a team of disease detectives to investigate the outbreak in Wuhan. Had CDC specialists been allowed to visit China in early January, Redfield believes, they would have learned exactly what the world was facing. The new disease was a coronavirus, and as such it was thought to be only modestly contagious, like its cousin the SARS virus. This assumption was wrong. The virus in Wuhan was far more infectious, and it spread in large part by asymptomatic transmission. “That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,” Redfield told me. “You’re going to be missing 50 percent of the cases. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.” The testing fiasco marked the second failed opportunity America had to control the Covid contagion. At a Coronavirus Task Force meeting, Redfield announced that the CDC would send a limited number of test kits to five “sentinel cities.” Pottinger was stunned: five cities? Why not send them everywhere? He learned that the CDC makes tests, but not at scale. For that, you have to go to a company like Roche or Abbott—molecular-testing powerhouses which have the experience and capacity to manufacture millions of tests a month. The CDC, Matt realized, was “like a microbrewery—they’re not Anheuser-Busch.”