With five U.S. patients contracting the new virus that has killed more than 80 people in China comes the question: Is the United States better prepared for the catastrophic outbreak than it was with Ebola?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that we’re better prepared than we were before, but not nearly as prepared as we need to be, according to an article on The Washington Post website.
The U.S. has made progress in preparedness since the anthrax scare of 2001, the SARS crisis in 2003, the MERS outbreak of 2014 and the Ebola epidemic that ended in 2016, according to experts.
When hospitals were evaluated after the Ebola crisis, 71 percent of administrators considered their facilities unprepared to receive Ebola patients in 2014 — a figure that had dropped to 14 percent by 2017. But any system is only as good as the information fed into it, and little is still known about the new coronavirus.
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