"It was obvious weeks ago to those of us on the front lines of public health that contact tracing at the very best was going to slow the [COVID-19] virus temporarily and never going to stop it from spreading widely across the US — never."
"Right now we're approaching this like it's the Washington, D.C., blizzard — for a couple days we're shut down. This is actually a coronavirus winter, and we're in the first week."
"No health care organization has gone out and stockpiled lots of personal protective equipment. They have always bought it on a just-in-time basis. So now we're paying the price for that."
"I think that it was unfortunate that a number of public health professionals said early on when COVID-19 first emerged that annual influenza was a much more serious problem. What they hadn't understood was that they were only watching the opening scene of this particular 'coronavirus winter,' as I call it. We can expect to see a large number of deaths moving forward."
"Assume this [COVID-19] virus is everywhere....The President was not lying when he got up in front of the country and described the small number of cases we had confirmed. That was true, but did it reflect the reality of what was happening? Absolutely not."
"It's always been easy to be abstract when you're a public health person when something's happening in Africa or Asia or the Arabian peninsula. But now it's happening here, and we have to internalize this."
"This is a very important contribution to understanding both the natural history of COVID-19 clinical disease as well as the public health implications of viral shedding.... Early and potentially highly efficient transmission of the virus occurs before clinical symptoms or in conjunction with the very first mild symptoms."
"What we need to do is to basically be able to share the news of what we know and don't know [about COVID-19], but then tell people what are we going to do about it, how are we going to respond. And that's what they're doing in Singapore."
"This [COVID-19] virus is already all around the country. Think of this like seasonal influenza. We have regions that in any given week have more activity than other regions, but by the time the entire season is done, it’s covered the entire country. And when was the last time anyone thought of quarantining the United States for seasonal influenza?"
"I think right now we're in uncharted territory with this [COVID-19] virus. By July, it could be largely absent from our communities or it could be a big problem. By early May we ought to be starting to have a better handle on it."
"You can make a vaccine against anything overnight. The challenge is does it work and is it safe? This is a long laborious process that can sometimes take many years, even under the best of conditions."
"We just can’t shut down the world. So our job is going to be in the face of this coronavirus problem of making sure we also provide for the basic necessities for everyone until we get through."
"While the case-fatality rate is much lower [with the COVID-19 virus], the transmission is quite dynamic, and many more people will get it. So comparing this illness with SARS or MERS is not helpful."
"It [community COVID-19 spread] just tells us where there is testing, there are cases. And that’s what we have to understand. There is no such thing as a barrier containment to keep these out. It's going to happen. And what we have to do now is get on with how we're going to deal with them."
"Our prediction is we're going to start seeing widespread [COVID-19] transmission in the United States in the next 4 to 6 weeks. It's already occurring as early transmission now. We're just missing it because of the inability to test."
"We need, right now, to really develop communication plans so that we're checking on people every day. That's the kind of thing that's going to get us through this [COVID-19 outbreak]; it's not going to be some magic bullet or the fact that we're going to be protected by masks. That's not going to happen."
