New: The US was completely unprepared for a slowly creeping pandemic—let alone a biological attack that would overwhelm it all at once. “When one thinks about what a bioterror attack would look like—it is crystal clear we're not even close to being ready." politico.com/news/2020/03/1…
Covid-19 was not manufactured. But the scale of the outbreak is the closest thing the U.S. has seen to how a bioweapon can shut down a society and severely strain resources, several sources said, & biodefense experts are watching its spread closely. 1/
“We haven’t seen anything that appears to be this pathogenic and transmissible since maybe 1918 or 1957,” said a US gov official. And the response so far to Covid “shows we don’t have the systems in place to rapidly diagnose cases, or to scale up a mass response very quickly.” 2/
Today's mantra of “flattening the curve” would not apply to a bioterror attack. “The people in that cloud would be infected all at once, so you would see a very large spike of sick patients." The response to Covid-19 has shown the system is nowhere near ready to handle that. 3/
“Routinely, we are not even able to surge for a bad flu season,” said Ali Khan, who served as CDC’s director of public health preparedness and response and helped establish CDC’s bioterrorism program. "We are eight weeks behind where we should have been in terms of our planning.”
