The Premonition: A Pandemic Story Highlight

Lawler discovered—and could not quite believe—that the CDC didn’t plan to test any of the new arrivals unless they had a fever. All of the foreigners being shipped home from Wuhan were being tested before they got on the plane, and the CDC felt that was adequate. The Germans and the Australians and the Japanese had tested all of their citizens after they’d flown home from Wuhan and discovered that 1 to 2 percent of them were infected, and that many of those had no symptoms: the tests in Wuhan hadn’t identified any of them.