***Not according to transcripts from CDC public telebriefing call @2/26/2020 with reporters:
"
The U.S. has been implementing an aggressive containment strategy that requires detecting, tracking, and isolating all cases. As much as possible and preventing more introduction of disease notably at points of entry. We’ve restricted travel into the United States while also issuing extensive travel advisories for countries currently experiencing community spread. Our travel notices are changing almost daily. We’ve also enacted the first quarantine of this scale in the U.S. And are supporting the state department and HHS in repatriating citizens from high-risk areas. We are doing this with the goal of slowing the introduction of this new virus into the U.S. And buying us more time to prepare. To date, our containment strategies have been largely successful. As a result, we have very few cases in the United States and no spread in the community. But as more and more countries experience community spread, successful containment at our borders becomes harder and harder. Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness. We will maintain for as long as practical a dual approach where we continue measures to contain this disease but also employ strategies to minimize the impact on our communities. At this time, there’s no vaccine to protect against this new virus and no medications approved to treat it. Non-pharmaceutical interventions or NPIs will be the most important tools in our response to this virus. What these interventions look like at the community level will vary depending on local conditions. What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won’t necessarily be appropriate for a community where no local transmission has occurred. This parallel, proactive approach of containment and mitigation will delay the emergence of community spread in the United States while simultaneously reducing its ultimate impact. To illustrate how this works, I’d like to share with you some of the specific recommendations made in the document I mentioned last Friday including some of the steps we would take here if needed. This document is called Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza United States 2017. It draws from the findings of nearly 200 journal articles written between 1990 and 2016. This document looked at what can be done at the individual and community level during a pandemic when we don’t have a vaccine or proven medical treatment for the disease. We’re looking at data since 2016 and adjusting our recommendations to the specific circumstances of COVID-19. But this posted document provides a frame work for our response strategy. Based on what is known now, we would implement these NPI measures in a very aggressive, proactive way as he have been doing with our containment efforts.
There are three categories of NPIs. Personal NPIs which include personal protective measures you can take every day and personal protective measures reserved for pandemics. Community NPIs which include social distancing measures designed to keep people who are sick away from others. And school closures and dismissals. And environmental NPIs which includes surface cleaning measures. NPIs routinely recommended for prevention of respiratory virus transmission include everyday personal protective measures. These are preventive measures we recommend during influenza season. These NPIs are recommended during a pandemic regardless of the severity level of the respiratory illness. Personal protective measures reserved for pandemics include voluntary home quarantine of household members who have been exposed to someone they live with who is sick. Now I’d like to talk through some examples of what community NPIs look like. These are practical measures that can help limit exposure by reducing exposure in community settings. Students in smaller groups or in a severe pandemic, closing schools and using internet-based teleschooling to continue education. For adults, businesses can replace in-person meetings with video or telephone conferences and increase teleworking options. On a larger scale, communities may need to modify, postpone, or cancel mass gatherings. Looking at how to increase telehealth services and delaying elective surgery. The implementation of environmental NPIs would require everyone to consistently clean frequently touched surfaces and objects at home, at school, at work, and at large gatherings. Local communities will need to look at which NPIs to implement and when based on how transmission and disease is and what can be done locally. This will require flexibility and adaptations as disease progresses and new information becomes available. Some of these measures are better than none. But the maximum benefit occurs when the elements are layered upon each other. Some community level interventions that may be most effective in reducing the spread of a new virus like school closures are also the most likely to be associated with unwanted consequences and further disruptions."
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0225-cdc-telebriefing-covid-19.html
So....who or what were Cuomo, Mayor Wilhelm and the NYC Director of Health Orixis Barbot listening to in Feb and March?
I know that's what was communicated, but none of that means squat if the first step is not being done - detecting, which means testing. Early in a pandemic, by far the most important activity is testing. This was written on 2/26 when, in retrospect by numerous analyses, we had tens of thousands of cases in NY/NJ. And testing, especially early on, is 100% owned by the Federal Government and it was an abject failure as I've described.
You also don't appear to read any of my posts on this, but I'll repeat. NY/NJ combined had 1 positive case and zero deaths through 3/2, because there was a grand total of about 3 tests run by then, about a week after this communication. NY/NJ then
slowly ramped up testing, with NY not hitting 1000 tests per day (when we should've been at 20,000 per day) until 3/13 and NJ not hitting 500 tests per day until 3/22 (and should've been at at least 10,000/day).
If the authorities don't know anything about who's infected and where transmissions are occurring then it's impossible for them to do the rest of the steps in the pandemic playbook sequence, i.e., tracing/isolating positive cases and contacts of positive cases. In fact it was so bad that we were flying completely blind and that is a death sentence in a pandemic - and didn't start to understand the magnitude of the explosive growth until about mid-March, really leaving shut downs as the only intervention left to NY/NJ (and CT, MA, PA, DE, RI), since nobody (other than me and a few others back then) was recommending masks.
Even on 3/16, when schools, bars, restaurants, casinos etc. shut down in NY/NJ/CT, NJ only had 178 cases via testing and NY only had 967, when in truth there were likely 50-100X that many already, as borne out by the fact that only 2 weeks later, NJ had 17,000 cases (95X) and NY had 76,000 (79X), despite most of the area being shut down by 3/16 (and formally shut down a few days later).
That growth rate was insane, which is why I've said we're never going to see that anywhere else in the US again, i.e., TX/FL aren't going to go from their 1000-2000 case/day baseline from recently to 50-100K cases per day (or at least we better hope to hell they aren't). That's why they're not likely going to have death rates anywhere near what ours were (even if death rates weren't likely decreasing some due to procedures/treatments), but they'll likely still be substantial starting soon.
FL, TX, AZ, GA, CA and many other states are having more cases per day now than we had
cumulatively on 3/16, yet we were shutting everything down and those states are debating asking people to wear masks and maybe slow down reopenings (except CA, which has a mask requirement now). It's also why comparing the outbreaks in the NE US states to the rest of the US and saying the rest of the US did "better" is very unfair.
