(NewsNation) — The former coordinator of the White House coronavirus response in the early days of the pandemic says if the U.S. wants to be prepared for the next health crisis, it needs to learn from its mistakes.
Dr. Deborah Birx was in the spotlight nearly daily in 2020, informing the public on how the Trump administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were handling the infectious disease that killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
Nearly four years later, the response and actions taken by the government have been subject to scrutiny, whether it be over mask mandates or how much scientists knew about the virus.
“It’s really important that we understand what went wrong in that first entire year, and I think the No. 1 thing was they weren’t willing to really understand that COVID was a very different virus than flu,” Birx said Wednesday on “CUOMO.” “We were late to testing, we were late to really talking about asymptomatic spread, and we were very late in recognizing the aerosol nature of this virus.”
The virus has mutated a number of times since 2020, and vaccines have been updated multiple times. The most widely circulating variant right now is JN.1, according to the CDC, which continues to track hospitalizations and deaths.
Hospitalizations have been trending upward since November, and there were more than 34,000 hospitalizations in the week of Dec. 30. Globally, the head of the World Health Organization said 10,000 people died from COVID-19 last month, driven by holiday gatherings and the new variant.
The ailment known as long COVID also continues to puzzle doctors, who have not yet been able to identify what causes the prolonged symptoms in patients.
As the virus continues to infect Americans, Birx draws comparisons to HIV, which was also asymptomatic at first.
“There’s two sides of this coin every time. There’s a lot of destruction that mild and moderate COVID can do that is on-scene just like HIV was destroying our immune system, but what came out of that is brilliant science that changed how we treated HIV,” Birx said. “If you’re diagnosed today, you can live a very normal lifespan and people not only survive, but thrive. We need to get to the place where people with long COVID … cannot only survive, but thrive.”
