Rigorous testing key to fight COVID-19 says Johns Hopkins epidemiologist

New York, April 9 (IANS) Countries that have conducted widespread testing have done fairly well in the fight against COVID-19 and those struggling to contain the spread of the pandemic may do well to follow their lead, according to epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in the US.

Rather than hoping that a vaccine will soon be available and everything will suddenly be alright, nations affected by the pandemic should continue to test widely, identify those with the disease and isolate them, while also asking the general population to continue to practice social distancing until effective treatments are available, she said in an interview to JSTOR Daily, an online publication that contextualises current events with scholarship.

In September 2019, less than three months before the outbreak of COVID-19 in China's Wuhan area became public, Nuzzo and her colleagues published a WHO/World Bank-commissioned report titled "Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic."

The report identified priority actions for countries, international organisations, and other stakeholders to pursue that would mitigate the public health, economic, social, and political consequences of the emergence of a high-impact respiratory pathogen - months before the world got introduced to COVID-19.