By RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock

Our staying safe during a disease outbreak requires that we have clear, science-based information available to us at all times. Sadly, however, we are living in an age in which many people reject science. We are also living in an age when one widely watched news network consistently purveys false information about a range of science related matters, now including coronavirus.

Worse than that, however, is that we have a government which demands loyalty over truth and which is muzzling our scientific, medical, and public health institutions. Coordinating communications during a disease outbreak is good. Muzzling communications of our leading disease scientists is bad. Our president is completely ignorant of public health matters and has  consistently lied to the public about the timing of prospects for a vaccine against coronavirus. Our Vice-President presided as Governor of Indiana over one of the worst HIV outbreaks in modern US history, part of which was attributable to his failure to follow best public health practice.

Testing for coronavirus is central to knowing how the disease is spreading, to tracking infected patients, to tracking their contacts, and to trying to stem the outbreak. Yet, the US lagged badly on getting test kits out and had an overly narrow protocol for who could be tested. To make it worse, CDC has now removed from its coronavirus website the information it was earlier posting about the number of people tested.

I encourage everyone to urgently demand of their authorities that all levels of government provide honest, clear, and up to date information about the coronavirus outbreak at all times. We are heading toward the worst of all worlds on coronavirus: federal communications that are not transparent or factual, as in China, and a response to the virus by the federal government that is not as effective or efficient as it needs to be.

We should also encourage our authorities to adequately fund pandemic preparedness. As others have said before, we need to stop moving from complacency to panic and back to complacency, whenever we face a disease outbreak. We have now seen – again – that disease outbreaks have enormous economic consequences, in addition to their health consequences. It is much more  cost-efficient to stem such outbreaks through good preparedness than to have to address them as they spread more widely in the population.

Editor’s note: Richard Skolnik is the former regional director for health for South Asia at the World Bank. He was the director of an AIDS treatment program for Harvard and taught Global Health at the George Washington University and Yale. He is the author of Global Health 101 and the instructor for Yale/Coursera’s Essentials of Global Health.