How Serious is Coronavirus? Dr. Tom Inglesby Weighs In

AMANPOUR:

So how on this day, how worried are you? Is this people’s worst fears? Is it a pandemic? Is it something that you think is going to spread, you know, like Ebola did or, or in in its own location all those years ago?

TOM INGLESBY:
So I think it is a very serious outbreak and uh, it already has spread beyond China in small numbers, but most of those people seem to have been identified. We hope that most of them have been identified. Um, so it’s not a pandemic. A pandemic is disease that’s really spreading globally around the world, really unchecked, spread around the world. And at this point, really the majority of the vast burden of disease is still in China. But to the question of whether or not this is controllable, I think the honest answer is we don’t know if it’s controllable yet. So I think we really need to be going down two trails at once. The first trail is doing everything we possibly can to help China in its efforts to control the disease and getting people isolated and treated and diagnosed. But on the other hand, on track too, I think we should also be planning for the possibility that it’s not controllable and that it will spread other parts of the world.

AMANPOUR:
Okay. So let’s first take the China piece of this because obviously as you say, that’s the most important at the moment. Um, are you impressed, satisfied, pleased with the way the Chinese or thirties are dealing with this as opposed to how they dealt with, you know, in 2003 and four when SaaS started, are they being more transparent and I mean this lockdown is incredible when you think it affects, you know, close to 65 million people.

TOM INGLESBY:
Yeah, I mean I think they are being much more transparent than in the time of SARS. And there’s direction from the president himself saying that he is directing people to share information with the world, share with the world health organization, with other governments. So there is a lot more sharing. I think information could always be better and we could, they probably could improve the, the speed of information that they’re giving to the world, but it’s also a very chaotic situation there. It’s, there’s a lot going on. As you said. There are these now large scale quarantines unprecedented in size around major cities in China. There is, I think, um, some debate in the public health community around the world about whether that’s likely to help or whether it’s more likely to be a hindrance in trying to get control. But certainly you can’t [inaudible] you have to acknowledge that they’re being very, very aggressive in their efforts to try and contain the disease.