Under Trump, America is less prepared for a coronavirus outbreak
Opinion by Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridhar
February 24, 2020
Chelsea Clinton is the Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation and teaches at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. She completed her D.Phil in international relations at Oxford University, examining the first decade of the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria. Devi Sridhar is a professor at the University of Edinburgh's Medical School and holds the Chair in Global Public Health. Previously, she was associate professor in global health politics at Oxford University. They are the co-authors of "Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?" The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the authors; view more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN)The coronavirus that emerged from Wuhan, China, last year is causing alarm across the world, with fear that this could become the next pandemic. Late last month, the World Health Organization
declared the virus, named COVID-19, a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" and urged an immediate international response.
It
advised its member states to put in place national preparedness plans and procedures for identifying and responding to any COVID-19 cases that might present. The death toll of
more than 2,600 people far exceeds that of the SARS outbreak nearly 17 years ago.
This outbreak is terrifying for the
tens of millions of people impacted in Wuhan and in countries around the world, and it arguably could not come at a worse time for Americans.
There's a famous adage in public health: "Outbreaks are inevitable; epidemics are not."
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