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Six public health labs in the US plan to start monitoring the general population for the new coronavirus this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that the risk of the virus still remains low for the general population. But activating the disease surveillance network will allow the CDC and other public health officials to find any undetected virus circulating through the country.
“It’s important because right now, all the efforts are focused on people who have a direct link to China, or a direct link to lab-confirmed cases. There’s no system in place to detect low-level transmission that might be under the radar,” says Edward Belongia, the director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health…