First country in pandemic has higher moral obligation: Top WH official

The first country where a pandemic starts has a higher moral obligation to inform the rest of the world and maintain transparency as other countries are making decisions on the basis of that, a top White House official said on Sunday.

Deborah Birx, member of the White House Task Force on Coronavirus, made the comments during an interview to the ABC News.

It's always the first country that get exposed to the pandemic that has really a higher moral obligation on communicating on transparency because all the other countries around the world are making decisions on that, she said.

That's something that we can look into after this is over, she said.

 

By Sunday, the coronavirus, which originated in China, had infected more than 740,000 Americans and claimed the lives of 34,000 people in the US, the highest number of casualties for any country in the world.

I know the European countries are communicating very effectively with each other and with us. And when we get through this as a global community, we can figure out really what has to happen for first alerts and transparency and understanding very early on about how this virus and how incredibly contagious this virus is, Birx said.

Birx said that the level of transparency and communication that one needs during a pandemic is over-communication.

You have to communicate even the small nuances, she said.

You know, when you look at the outbreak that's been reported to China and you look at the outbreak that was able to be contained in South Korea and a series of Asian countries, you didn't see that kind of doubling rate, you didn't see that logarithmic increase that you see all throughout the developed countries of Europe and certainly in the United States, she noted.

So, when you look at those countries, it wasn't until the beginning of March that we could all fully see how contagious this virus was, how transmittable it was. I think that level between January when we had evidence of this apparently and when we really understood its level of transmissibility, she said.

The US, she said, is working on expanding testing strategy across the country in deep partnership with governors and more importantly, in partnership with the lab directors who actually know precisely what the issues are that need to be solved.

We preferentially put these tests where the outbreaks where so that people could be diagnosed, because the number one issue that the president want to address is make sure we were saving all the lives, he said.

So, he wanted to make sure that everyone who was sick had a test, and everyone who is sick that needed a hospital bed got a hospital bed, and everyone that needed a ventilator got a ventilator, Birx said.