Tucker Carlson sounds the alarm: 'America is not ready' for the coronavirus

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Tucker: Global leaders said coronavirus was under control

At least 35 countries have confirmed cases of coronavirus.

Tucker Carlson continued to warn of the potential impact of the coronavirus Tuesday after U.S. officials disclosed that an outbreak in the United States was likely.

"You'll remember that for a month, Western leaders told us that the virus was under control and was unlikely to cause serious problems for anyone in our hemisphere. None of that was true," Carlson said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." "Meanwhile, in China, an aggressively nationalist country that if nothing else, definitely doesn't hate itself, authorities acted immediately and with force. With military-grade discipline, they shut down the city of Wuhan, home to 11 million people. The rest of the world watched this happen in real time but yet assured themselves that everything was fine. It wasn't fine. We know that now."

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Carlson outlined the spread of the disease around the world, including in Italy and Iran, before centering on the United States.

"Today, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that a generalized outbreak is inevitable here," Carlson said. "It's not a question of if this will happen, but when. Officials warned Americans to be ready for severe disruptions to their lives."

The host highlighted an article in The Atlantic that cited a Harvard epidemiologist who predicted that between 40 percent and 70 percent of the world's population could get infected with the virus to some extent.

"Currently, the coronavirus appears to kill about two percent of the people who have it. So let's be generous for moment and imagine that asymptomatic carriers are not detected and the real death rate is only, say, half a percent. That would be one quarter of the current estimate," Carlson warned. "Even under that scenario, there would still be 27 million deaths from coronavirus globally. In this country, more than a million would die."

Returning to the Atlantic article, Carlson noted that the virus may end up as part of the medical landscape for quite some time.

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"Cold and flu season could become cold, flu and coronavirus season for the foreseeable future. Will that happen? Well, obviously, we're praying that it doesn't," Carlson said. "But we know one thing right now ... America is not ready for this or for any major epidemic thanks to the CDC's flawed rollout of the virus testing."

"Few locations in this country or even prepared to monitor coronavirus," he said.  And the economy, of course, isn't prepared either."