And now, the rest of the story....
Beginning Jan 6, CDC offered to assist China on three occasions; China refused assistance from all countries until Jan 28 when it agreed to allow a WHO team in for research and containment strategy.
However, on Feb 7:
For more than a month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been offering to send a team of experts to China to observe its coronavirus outbreak and help if it can.
Normally, teams from the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service can be in the air within 24 hours.
On Thursday, a W.H.O. spokeswoman said that there was no delay in the organization’s own mission to China.
“Our understanding is that the mission is on,” Marcia Poole, the spokeswoman, said. But she could not say when the team would leave or who would be on it.
The United States has offered Dr. Tedros 13 specialists who are ready to go, Mr. Azar said.
The two fields in which China appears to need outside help, experts said, are molecular virology and epidemiology.
The first involves sequencing the virus’s genome and manipulating it to refine diagnostic tests, treatments and vaccine candidates.
The second involves figuring out basic questions like who gets infected and who does not, how long the incubation period is, why some victims die, how many other people each victim infects and how commonly hospital outbreaks are occurring.
“This isn’t rocket science, it’s basic stuff — but it’s been five weeks and we still don’t know the answers,” one expert said.
China has greatly improved its ability to fight disease since it was embarrassed by SARS, and its scientists now frequently publish in major medical journals.
Many of them trained at the American C.D.C. and have friends there.
“We have a decade-long relationship,” Mr. Azar said Friday. “It’s not an accident that it’s called the Chinese C.D.C.”
C.D.C. and W.H.O. Offers to Help China Have Been Ignored for Weeks
The WHO team was not allowed in until Feb 16 and contained two U.S. CDC representatives.
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“CDC has had a 30-year partnership with China CDC and close collaboration,” the U.S. agency said in a statement. “We had the right staff to engage China and ability to provide technical assistance were it requested.”
Scott McNabb, who is a research professor at Emory University following a 20-year career as an epidemiologist (meaning he studies this) for the CDC doesn't think that, if Quick's position still existed, it would've mattered due to the Chinese government's reputation for censoring information anyway.
“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have had made a big difference,” McNabb commented. “The problem was how the Chinese handled it. What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”
Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, previously told CNN that he and CDC director Robert Redfield had made an official offer to put a CDC team into China during the first week of January 2020, but that they did not get permission to do so.
“Dr. Redfield and I made the offer on January 6th - 36 days ago, 60,000 cases and 1,300 deaths ago,” Azar said to the news organization on February 14. “We made the offer to send the CDC experts in to assist their Chinese colleagues to get to the bottom of key scientific questions like, how transmissible is this disease? What is the severity? What is the incubation period and can there be asymptomatic transmission?”
A team was allowed to go in on February 16, after the World Health Organization got them permission to do so. That team had two U.S. experts aboard. However, by that mid-February date, China had over 75,000 cases.
Because of all that, the CDC maintains that staffing decisions weren't the cause of the U.S.'s inability to learn about the virus prior to its worldwide outbreak.
Dr. George Conway, who is a medical epidemiologist who served as a resident advisor for three years and knows Quick, said that the position's funding was often debated because U.S. officials believed China should be funding their own training programs.
U.S. Reportedly Cut CDC Expert's Job in China Months Before Coronavirus Outbreak
In short, the implication that the CDC staff reduction mattered one iota is false.