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Fewer than 100 fatalities had been reported worldwide. On the night of Germany’s first positive test, the virus had seemed far away. It is also painfully clear that time was a critical commodity in curbing the virus - and that too much of it was wasted. But it is clear that an array of countries, from secretive regimes to overconfident democracies, have fumbled their response, misjudged the virus and ignored their own emergency plans. It is too soon to know whether the worst has passed, or if a second global wave of infections is about to crash down. I can’t explain it.”Įven now, with more than 9 million cases around the world, and a death toll approaching 500,000, Covid-19 remains an unsolved riddle. “I was surprised that it would cause such a storm. “This was, I think, a very simple truth,” Dr. Though estimates vary, models using data from Hong Kong, Singapore and China suggest that 30 to 60 percent of spreading occurs when people have no symptoms. It is now widely accepted that seemingly healthy people can spread the virus, though uncertainty remains over how much they have contributed to the pandemic. Countries like Singapore and Australia, which used testing and contact-tracing and moved swiftly to quarantine seemingly healthy travelers, fared far better than those that did not. It is impossible to calculate the human toll of that delay, but models suggest that earlier, aggressive action might have saved tens of thousands of lives. The resistance to emerging evidence was one part of the world’s sluggish response to the virus. The two-month delay was a product of faulty scientific assumptions, academic rivalries and, perhaps most important, a reluctance to accept that containing the virus would take drastic measures. A crucial public health discussion devolved into a semantic debate over what to call infected people without clear symptoms. Leading health agencies including the World Health Organization and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control provided contradictory and sometimes misleading advice. Interviews with doctors and public health officials in more than a dozen countries show that for two crucial months - and in the face of mounting genetic evidence - Western health officials and political leaders played down or denied the risk of symptomless spreading. They assumed it acted like its genetic cousin, SARS. Scientists at the time believed that only people with symptoms could spread the coronavirus. Days later, she tested positive for the coronavirus. She told colleagues that she had started feeling ill after the flight back to China.
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No coughing or sneezing, no signs of fatigue or fever during two days of long meetings. The visitor had seemed perfectly healthy during her stay in Germany. And that colleague should not have been contagious. Her patient, a businessman from a nearby auto parts company, could have been infected by only one person: a colleague visiting from China. She had just discovered Germany’s first case of the new coronavirus.īut the diagnosis made no sense. Camilla Rothe was about to leave for dinner when the government laboratory called with the surprising test result.
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But health officials dismissed the risk for months, pushing misleading and contradictory claims in the face of mounting evidence. Symptomless transmission makes the coronavirus far harder to fight.