AS a prominent public health physician and academic, Newcastle's Craig Dalton was simply doing his job when he and two colleagues, Stephen Corbett from Sydney University and Anthea Katelaris from the Australian National University in Canberra, wrote a short paper on the "pre-emptive" steps that societies could take to minimise the number and severity of COVID-19 cases.
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Through a serendipitous chain of events, the paper conceived and lead-written by Dr Dalton has become a central part of the Trump administration's plans to counter the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. Dr Dalton said last night that he had taken a week to write the paper, which was uploaded in draft form last Thursday to an online academic journal for "open peer review".
Soon after, a man the New York Times describes as America's leading immunologist, Dr Anthony Fauci - long-time head of the US government's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - became aware of the Australian work.
Dr Fauci clearly liked what he read, because at a media briefing on Monday, the Trump administration's coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx confirmed that a new set of guidelines for Americans to counter the spread of COVID-19 had been drawn directly from the Australian paper.
Standing with her were Dr Fauci and US Vice-President Mike Pence.
"All of this information came from a paper that Dr. Fauci provided from the Australians - first author Dalton," Dr Birx, also a physician, told the cameras.
"So you can actually look up the scientific evidence that informed each of these guidelines."
Dr Dalton has had more than 30 years in public health, including an early stint in the US with the Centers for Disease Control.
In 2006, he began developing the award-winning Flutracking website, in which users fill out a weekly web-based survey during flu season to help build a "big data" picture of infection rates.
Having grown from 400 to 50,000 followers, the university describes Flutracking as "the largest crowd-sourced public health surveillance system in the world".
Dr Dalton is well-placed to assess COVID-19, and his warning is typically blunt: "This is likely to be a nasty disease, particularly for the elderly, and we need a whole-of-government and whole-of-society response to contain it. It would be a serious mistake to think that this is just a bad flu."
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