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.
Alexei Navalny’s widow demands ‘accountability’ for Putin after European leaders say husband was poisoned
Casey Wasserman to sell his talent agency after becoming ‘distraction’ due to Epstein files
Fetterman slams Democrats’ ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ voter ID rhetoric as party unity fractures
ICE officers face criminal probe for alleged ‘untruthful statements’ under oath about Minneapolis shooting
Heroic 12-Year-Old Tried to Save Classmates from Trans Mass Shooter: She’s in Critical Condition
Zelensky offers to ‘give a ceasefire to the Russians if they do elections’ in Munich plea
CNN’s Data Guru Reveals How the Far-Left Is Devouring Democratic Party
Microsoft AI Chief Says Artificial Intelligence Will Do Most White-Collar Work by Next Year
Cities Church Defendant Who Likes Terrorizing Christian Children Launches Bizarre Message Outside Courtroom
Rubio breaks with Vance in tone of Munich address and tells Europe ‘we belong together’
SWAT swarms locations near Nancy Guthrie’s home as DNA found on property
Jasmine Crockett: ‘If I Go to Sleep, Democracy Very Well May Die’
Top Goldman Sachs Lawyer Quits Over Epstein Relationship, Media Glosses Over Her Connection to Obama
Conservative firebrand launches ‘TruckSafe Tipline’ to report illegal drivers amid spike in highway deaths
‘It’s absurd’: DHS shutdown bears down on US as lawmakers jet off to Europe
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.
