WASHINGTON (CN) — The U.S. is lagging woefully behind on large-scale domestic testing for coronavirus, a senior health expert told Congress on Wednesday, warning that the outbreak will get worse if actual containment efforts don’t get underway soon.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, delivered the bleak news at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee that coincided the World Health Organization’s announcement that that the global COVID-19 outbreak is officially a pandemic.
The recorded number of coronavirus cases now exceeds 1,000 individuals in 38 states across America, and the U.S. death toll stands at 31.
The worst is “yet to come,” Fauci said, noting that whenever a virus spreads through communities, the management dynamic shifts.
“It becomes a situation where you’re not going to be able to effectively and efficiently contain it,” Fauci said. “What you see now, even though we are containing it in some respects — we keep getting people that are coming into country who were exposed by travel, and then you get community spread. It makes the challenge greater. Things will get worse than they are right now, but how much worse depends on our ability to contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside and our ability to mitigate within our own country. The bottom line is it is going to get worse.”
Lawmakers also heard Wednesday from Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who said the sudden increase of domestic cases just 24 hours earlier was a clear indicator that the virus is spreading and fast.
Democrats on the committee, led by Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, excoriated the Trump administration for delays to test-kit distributions at the start of the U.S. outbreak in January and pointed to South Korea’s aggressive containment efforts.
South Korea was hit particularly hard, and the virus has so far infected roughly 7,500 people there, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or KDC. But drive-through testing, virus surveillance in public spaces and on public transportation, when combined with the nation’s quick start on distributing tests from the first sign of the outbreak, have made the outbreak more manageable.
The death toll in South Korea hit 54 Wednesday, but the KDC found that there were 150 fewer new cases of COVID-19 reported. Wednesday marks the fourth consecutive day that diagnosis rates have dropped.
The House Oversight Committee has long awaited Wednesday’s hearing. On March 3, Maloney issued letters to Fauci, Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar seeking information on diagnoses as well as their respective departments’ plans to handle costs associated with testing for the uninsured and underinsured.
The committee also wanted to know why the CDC initially refused to use testing kits already approved in 60 countries by the World Health Organization and instead went with their own design that ended up being defective.
The initial round of kits were contaminated at the CDC’s manufacturing center in Atlanta and an investigation spearheaded by the Food and Drug Administration is underway. Redfield declined to say whether the person or people responsible for bungling the process were removed or if there were plans to do so.
