Dr. Deborah Birx on Tuesday said that medical experts failed to understand the seriousness of the coronavirus because of incomplete data coming out of China.
“I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious but smaller than anyone expected,” she said. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data.”
Birx spoke about the experts’ relationship with the data during a White House press briefing on Tuesday evening.
She acknowledged frankly that when she saw early data from China reporting only 50,000 cases of the virus among the 20 million people in Wuhan, China, and the 80 million in Hubei province, she felt that the threat was similar to that of SARS, which had 8,098 cases globally and 774 deaths.
Elite school teacher known as ‘Mr Wonderful’ accused of heinous crimes against students
Bombshell New Photos Change the Story for Patriots Coach Mike Vrabel, Move Timeline Years Earlier
Prominent UFO Researcher Dies in Colorado
ICE nabs illegal aliens convicted of child sex crimes and meth trafficking in nationwide enforcement sweep
Todd Blanche targets record denaturalizations in citizenship fraud crackdown
RFK Jr. Blasts Canada’s ‘Abhorrent’ Assisted Suicide Laws: US Can’t Be ‘Moral Society’ by Embracing Them
‘Lame duck’: Jeffries rips DeSantis after Florida invitation as redistricting fight heats up
Transgender Arrested for Allegedly Kidnapping Child and Taking Him Overseas for Gender Surgery
Dems jockeying for Newsom endorsement give passing grades on issue that ignited ‘poop map’ crisis
Trump: US doesn’t know who ‘the leader is in Iran’
20,000 teddy bear display on National Mall: ‘Bring Ukrainian children’ home
Guatemalan man charged with child porn possession released by Fairfax County despite ICE detainer, DHS says
Noncitizen ex-Kansas mayor pleads guilty to illegally voting multiple times
Mamdani Throws His Support Behind Arrested NYC Councilman
With Racism Increasingly Hard to Find, the SPLC Filled a Need the Media and Dems Couldn’t Live Without
The devastation hitting countries like Italy and Spain and South Korea gave the experts much more complete data, helping them draw models that were far more alarming.
“Let’s see if we can do much better than that,” President Donald Trump said during the briefing, pointing to the models predicting 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States.
Trump noted that the virus was also more contagious than expected.
“I think the one thing that nobody really knew about this virus was how contagious it was,” he said. “It’s so incredibly contagious, and nobody knew that.”
Story cited here.
