Speaking at Monday’s White House briefing on the COVID-19 Chinese coronavirus pandemic, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that no one had planned for what we are going through now: A respiratory disease outbreak on top of a seasonal flu outbreak.

Dr. Deborah Birx speaks at White House coronavirus task force briefing, screen image, March 23.

Excerpt from White House transcript:

Q If we could clarify with Dr. Birx. We seem to be talking about different geographical slopes on this; the curve would be changing. And yet, you just said the 20 percent number that is coming out in New York gives an indication that we don’t quite know when the seeds — to use your metaphor — were planted. So how confident are you on the start dates of each curve for each of the geographical areas? The President seems to be indicating we’ll be adjusting the policy for it.

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DR. BIRX: So that’s a very good question. So, what we do know is now we can backtrack from people who get very seriously ill to when they probably got infected, which is when they were exposed. And so when you start backing out each of those pieces, when you start seeing hospitalized patients, you know that the virus has probably been there for three to four weeks, substantially circulating within the population. So that’s what we’re looking for.

Now, as all of our testing is improved — and we want to really applaud the group who has worked on it — you know, if you look at the pandemic flu preparedness, all of this was built on a flu platform. It was never, ever thought that you’d have a simultaneous respiratory disease hitting at exactly the same time as your flu hits in the country.

And so when you’re doing all of your flu surveillance, you could have small cases of these pneumonias and flu-like illnesses, characterized as a flu-like illness for the last four to six weeks. And so that’s really a caution to all of us.

And so when we get through all of this, we’ll be looking at each of the pandemic preparedness plans. A long way of saying we know Washington State is a little bit ahead of New York because of the hospitalization records. What we will get to, as a country, with the amount of testing that will be available, is being able to do what the President talked about simultaneously — simultaneously doing containment contract [sic] tracing at the same time you’re doing mitigation.

And I think, right now, we put everything into mitigation. Yet, if we geographically get specific data by zip codes and counties, we’ll be able to approach this in a very laser-focused way, making sure that what we’re doing in each of those areas is absolutely appropriate for where they are in their own little bell-shaped curve.