A Virus Expert Discusses Infectious Disease

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Did you know that something like this could happen so soon?

DR. DENNIS CARROLL, FORMER DIRECTOR, USAID’S PANDEMIC INFLUENZA AND EMERGING THREATS UNIT: Well, the answer, Christiane, is absolutely. The emergence of this particular coronavirus really comes as no surprise. We could never predict which would be the next virus and we could never predict exactly when. But it was clear that the dynamics that drive viruses circulating in wildlife, to spill over in the people, they’re intensifying and the frequency with which these are happening is going up. It is all driven by population pressure. So, what we’re seeing with COVID-19 virus is symptomatic of sort of a new age. We are going to see more and more of these events as we move further into the 21st century.

So, interestingly, we showed it in the trailer, it’s sort of like these virus sleuths, investigators, people who need to keep an eye on everything that’s going on in the field and they were in the Democratic Republic of Congo because of Ebola, they were in Egypt and Lebanon because of various versions of flu, whether it was swine flu, avian flu, all those that cropped up in 2000s. We saw doctors in the United States, doctors in India. It looks like there is a huge amount of knowledge, just a huge amount of knowledge and people like yourself and these characters on the lookout. Can you explain in today’s context why then, including the fact that there were pandemic playbooks, we seem to be caught so completely, for want of a better word, with our trousers down?

Well, first off, I think the fact that this virus was picked up and identified as a coronavirus, remember, it began as an event of unknown causes. And within a fairly short period of time, a matter of two to three weeks after it was first publicly identified, there was a clear recognition that, one, we were not looking at an influenza virus. We were looking at a coronavirus that has a striking similarities to its cousin the SARS virus. The — really the surprise wasn’t so much the emergence and the early spread, it was the lack of a coordinated regional or an even global response.