Cronavirus covid-19 WATCH: Latest updates on COVID-19: July 17, 2020

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Transcript for Latest updates on COVID-19: July 17, 2020

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Some of the major developments we’re tracking on this Friday, confirmed coronavirus cases around the world now closing in on 14 million. With more than 3.5 million of those cases right here in the U.S. As well over 1 million Americans get back on their feet. With me now is Dr. Jen Ashton. Dr. Ashton, the U.S. Leading the world with cases, followed by Brazil, then India. Brazil is trending downward and we know that the U.S. Is trending upward. You have information about how much of this was predicted. Tell us about that. Let’s go back to October 2019, Johns Hopkins school of public health convened an international group of experts to do a pandemic preparedness drill. It wasn’t the first one they did. Ironically, they chose a new strain of coronavirus as their simulated pathogen, by coincidence. They looked at 195 countries, asked 140 countries, over six categories like preparedness, detection, rapid response. Here’s the 300-page report but I want to tell you what they found, because this might surprise you. First of all, they found that overall, and this is direct quote, no country was fully prepared for an epidemic or a pandemic. However results globally were weak. Only 19% of countries received top marks for their ability to detect pathogens and fewer than 5% of countries scored in the highest tier for their ability to respond and then mitigate a pandemic response. So, not good scores. All right, and it’s interesting, because we did score well, the United States, we were in the top tier, and yet we see where we are now, how did that happen? Not only we were in top tier, Amy, but take a look at this ranking, we scored number one in the world in terms of our preparedness, Brazil ranked 22 and India ranked 57. All countries in the top tier and these are the three countries with the highest cases at this point, so it tells you that if they were scored in top tier and they are doing the worst in actuality there’s a big mismatch. What are the factors that contribute to that mismatch? When you look at this going forward, they really stratified across six areas, and what they were looking at were things like, detection and reporting, are there laboratories systems there that have the capacity for detecting disease? They looked at the rapid response to a pandemic or the ability to mitigate a spread and is private sector involved in the respond, here it is. Sufficient health system to treat sick people and protect health workers. Does the system have surge capacity? And is there compliance with international and global norms such as sharing data and cross-border agreements, these were all part of the parameters. They’re trying to fix this in realtime, Amy, and prepare us for the next one in the future. Those were very surprising numbers, indeed, Amy. Thank you.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

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