The article makes it very clear that he is speaking of the immediate forecast (next 3-6 months) not the longer term (6 months to 1 year or more). The virus is a

The article makes it very clear that he is speaking of the immediate forecast (next 3-6 months) not the longer term (6 months to 1 year or more). The virus is already all over the globe, so technically it's already edging near a pandemic. The question to ask (and the article asks it) is do we have something that will materially alter spread in hand today or at most within the month. If the answer is "No" then the virus is likely to spread. "No" is a correct reading of the facts as they stand today. This isn't about FDA conservatism or anything like that, it's "what do we have in hand?" No matter how promising current experimental treatments might be (perhaps Remdesivir will work well), they WILL NOT stop the spread in the short term. They WILL MAYBE help with treating acute cases and lower fatality rate. Still, good confirmation is a few months out, so for March/April we're still looking at very little. The only therapeutic that could stop the spread is a vaccine. That's even further out, they're just starting some tests, but it's not going to be ready for wide deployment for another year. You don't want to inject things into healthy people on a massive scale without doing a few controls. All of these approaches suffer from production questions too: it takes a while to ramp, but yes that could be helped by a massive effort. In short, wash your hands. A lot. Don't touch your face. If you're sick, quarantine. In 6 months we'll hopefully be better equipped therapeutically, but don't expect that to solve the immediate problem.