"Once again, we’re not that prepared," said Dr. Boris Lushniak, a former deputy and acting U.S. Surgeon General who spent 13 years at CDC.
As state and local public health offices scramble to respond to the coronavirus outbreak, they do so against a backdrop of years-long budget cuts, leaving them without the trained employees or updated equipment to adequately address the virus' growing threat, former public health officials say.
"Once again, we’re not that prepared," said Dr. Boris Lushniak, a former deputy and acting U.S. Surgeon General who spent 13 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is now dean of University of Maryland's School of Public Health. "When those aren’t supported well, in the time of emergency you don’t have the infrastructure to shift gears and go into emergency mode.
Public health represented 2.5% - or just $274 per person – of all U.S. health spending in the country in 2017, according to the nonprofit Trust for America's Health.Think you have coronavirus? Call first! Here's what to expect at the doctor's officeUS learned from Ebola but is 'nowhere near as prepared' as needed if coronavirus outbreak happened here
"While we are waiting, people are getting sick and the response doesn’t wait," said Castrucci, now CEO of the deBeaumont Foundation."We don’t have the luxury, working in public health, to wait for money to come." "I might be concerned that we may not have enough protective equipment, surgical masks, things of that nature, where our stockpile we might want to have be a little bit larger," said Caine.
It takes six to nine months to find and hire the people capable of doing the testing and other surveillance work needed, said Dr. Lamar Hasbrouck, a former CDC medical epidemiologist, who was Illinois' health secretary from 2012 to 2015.
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