CDC director: More person-to-person coronavirus infections in U.S. likely

CDC Director Robert Redfield tells STAT's Helen Branswell that there are likely to more cases of human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus in the U.S. It's not going to be possible to seal the country off from the virus, but, he added in an interview yesterday, “we do gain time by prolonging the containment phase as long as we can, provided that we still believe that’s a useful public health effort.” Containment could be achieved by implementing so-called social distancing measures, he said, steps such as closing some public facilities in an effort to limit the number of people who are infected. The U.S. has thus far seen 14 cases of the disease, two of which were caused by human-to-human transmission. If one person's illness begins a chain of three or four other infections in turn, then containment will have failed, Redfield said. The disease, now called Covid-19, has resulted in nearly 60,000 cases worldwide and more than 1,350 deaths.