Had the Chinese government been more forthright at the outset, there was a chance that the virus could have been contained there. Later, in the US, the effort to find effective tactics and therapies to stop the virus would also suffer from a lack of reliable information as we struggled to establish a truth standard about what would be most effective, and to agree on a reliable set of actions for containing spread. In a public health crisis, reliable information is a vital currency for decision making. The spark of transmission was lit amid the suppression and distortion of key facts.
