Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

For a long time, without adequate testing and with no emphasis on diagnosing asymptomatic cases, the CDC was attributing a lot of the transmission it was seeing, and that it couldn’t explain, not to asymptomatic infections but to “fomites”—a circumstance where someone touches a surface that had become contaminated with the respiratory secretions of an infected patient and then touches his or her own nose, eyes, or mouth. The CDC saw a whole bunch of cases where they couldn’t trace patients back to a sick contact, and so the agency wrongly assumed that the transmission chain must have been lit by touching a surface that was contaminated with respiratory secretions. Instead, it was probably through direct contact with an asymptomatic person.