| A few early cases of a worrying respiratory disease are identified. Government leaders say the risk is low and downplay the threat of spread.
More cases appear, but bottlenecks in testing mean it’s hard to get an exact idea of how many people are actually infected. As diagnostic capacity rises, the government acknowledges the threat of the disease and puts in place never-before-contemplated restrictions on business and movement.
Hospitals begin to fill up, health-care workers get infected, and the death toll starts to rise.
It’s hard to tell the difference between the outbreak in China and the one in the U.S., isn’t it?
Emergency Medical Technicians bring a patient into Wyckoff Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on April 6.
Photographer: Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images
There are differences between the coronavirus epidemics in the two countries, but the similarities are depressingly similar.
In the latest unfortunate parallel, U.S. doctors who can’t get access to tests to diagnose Covid-19 patients are turning to CT scans, using the infection’s telltale damage to the lungs to confirm new cases. The same was done in China, where underequipped health workers had to use other criteria to try and track the disease.
If you want to know how the outbreaks in the U.S. end, look to China. Only now, three months later, is Wuhan beginning to slowly open back up.
Epidemics follow patterns. Right now, the world is playing out the situation in Wuhan, over and over. The question is whether we get any better at it with every new iteration. —Drew Armstrong |