“Disruption to everyday life may be severe,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned at a news conference Tuesday.
Schools could be closed, mass public gatherings suspended and businesses forced to have employees work remotely, she said. Messonnier said the coronavirus has caused sickness and death and sustained person-to-person transmission. That’s two of the three factors for a pandemic, she said. “As community spread is detected in more and more countries, the world moves closer to meeting the third criteria – worldwide spread of the new virus,” Messonnier said. Although the World Health Organization determined Monday that the term pandemic “did not fit the facts,” experts said it very soon could. Dennis Carroll, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Global Health Security and Development Unit, credited China’s “extraordinary control measures” with delaying the spread of the virus, but he said avoiding a pandemic is “very unlikely.” “The dramatic uptick of cases in South Korea, Iran and Italy are reflective of a self-sustaining spreading of the virus and a clear message that the horse is out of the barn,” Carroll, who leads the Global Virome Project science cooperative, told USA TODAY. Melissa Nolan, a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, cited new clusters in Iran, which faces at least 95 cases and has had 16 deaths, and Italy, which is dealing with 322 cases.
“If we continue to see focalized local transmission in areas outside of China, the WHO will need to reconvene,” Nolan told USA TODAY on Tuesday. “We are very close to seeing this virus becoming a pandemic.”
Nolan said responses to the outbreaks in Iran and Italy could help health officials in other countries prepare their own medical and quarantine policies before an outbreak. That is crucial, said Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital who fears the world is on the “cusp” of a pandemic.
“Trying to contain a disease which spreads like influenza, in this case COVID-19, is almost impossible,” he said. “We are talking about rapid-fire and sustained transmission.”
Beyond an epidemic, which involves a defined region, a pandemic has global impact. It can be a moving target – there is no threshold, such as number of deaths or infections.