Pence defends US coronavirus response as contagion spreads

US Vice-President Mike Pence on Sunday defended the US administration’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic after the first confirmed deaths on American soil and rising criticism of the state of US preparedness. Pence and Health Secretary Alex Azar made the rounds of Sunday talk shows with the message that risks from the disease remain low for most Americans, while promising to make up for testing shortfalls. “We could have more sad news, but the American people should know the risk to the average American remains low,” Pence said on CNN’s State of the Union. The assurances came a day after officials confirmed that two men had died in the northwestern state of Washington after becoming infected with the virus. The first was a man in his 50s, with no known contact with persons infected abroad. The second was a man in his 70s. Both had “underlying health issues,” according to the public health officials. Azar told Fox News Sunday the man in his 50s was in a hospital to which a nursing home, hit by a coronavirus outbreak, had sent patients. “So right now there’s a large investigation going on in the nursing home, the hospital, contact tracing to try to determine where that disease was introduced and how it might have spread,” he said. The number of known coronavirus cases in the US had reached at least 80 as of Sunday, counting people evacuated from a cruise ship and the city of Wuhan in China. Elsewhere, authorities announced Sunday a third case in Illinois and Rhode Island and New York’s first cases as worried Americans swarmed stores to stock up on basic goods such as bottled water, canned foods and toilet paper. The first US case was a Washington state man who had visited China, where the virus first emerged, but several recent cases in the US have had no known connection to travellers. In California, two health care workers in the San Francisco Bay area who cared for an earlier coronavirus patient were diagnosed with the virus on Sunday, the Alameda and Solano counties said in a joint statement. Trump says ‘no reason to panic’ as US reports first coronavirus death Genetic analysis suggests the novel coronavirus had probably been spreading undetected for about six weeks in Washington state, The New York Times reported. The spread of the virus through communities would be an ominous development that would almost certainly intensify the epidemic in the United States. US health authorities have been slow to distribute coronavirus testing kits, however, making the dimensions of the problem uncertain. “It’s a very fair question, and it’s one of the first issues that governors I spoke to raised with me,” Pence said when asked on CNN why the US was so far behind other countries in producing testing kits. He said more than 15,000 testing kits were released over the weekend, the federal Food and Drug Administration has approved a testing regime, and the government was working with a commercial provider to produce an additional 50,000 kits. President Donald Trump put Pence in charge of the US response last week, amid rising complaints that the administration had been slow to prepare for the virus’s spread. Trump himself had been criticised for seeming to lowball the risk, even as experts from the federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention warned of a looming health emergency. Former vice-president and Democratic candidate Joe Biden attacked what he described as Trump’s “incompetence” in dealing with the epidemic, accusing him of muzzling the government’s top experts. “I see no preparedness other than political talking points,” he said on ABC’s This Week. Democrats also have roundly attacked proposed Trump budget cuts for the CDC and for eliminating in 2018 a senior White House position for a director in charge of global health security. Right-wing commentators, meanwhile, have accused Democrats of “weaponising” the health crisis, while the president’s son Donald Trump Jnr accused them of hoping the virus “kills millions” to hurt his father. In defending the administration’s response, Pence credited Trump with acting quickly to establish quarantines for Americans brought back from China and Japan. “The coronavirus remains low – and that is largely owing to the decision the president made, the energetic efforts of CDC and local health officials, and we’ll continue to lean in that in a hopeful way,” the vice-president said. Additional reporting by Associated Press