The nation has reached the halfway point in the federal government's call for a 15-day period to flatten the curve when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, and in a week there will be a better picture on where the nation stands, former acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said Sunday.
"The Coronavirus Task Force, all the public health professionals, everybody's working on analyzing the models," McAleenan told ABC News' "This Week." "I think a week from now, we'll have a better picture. In four weeks, we'll have much more clarity on how long this is going to last and the extent of the illness."
McAleenan said he's had the opportunity to work closely with FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor, and now the operation muscle of FEMA is backing the Department of Health and Human Services, but information on the battle against coronavirus is flowing "at a different scale" than in any crisis he's ever seen.
"We're trying to bring in data from hospitals, medical professionals, we're trying to look at in 140 countries where this disease is presently," said McAleenan. "Just in my 20 years at DHS, we dealt with things from Ebola in 2016 very significantly to Zika, SARS, MERS. What's different about this is the infectious combined with the lethality. This is a different pathogen."
Meanwhile, the United States has reached a "very important point" in dealing with the crisis.
"There's a lot of preparation," he said. "There's a lot of equipment in the stockpile. Again the scale of this is very different...there are 20 vaccines already in testing. You got antiviral testings on the therapeutic side that might make a difference. We're all moving in a complementary direction (amid a) lack of partisanship."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.