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In the meantime, the government needs to take a hard look at their public health offices and boost resources needed to collect more detailed data on disease outbreaks, Scarpino said.

While Scarpino said some states' health agencies took extra steps to track and trace cases to specific locations, overall, agencies were undermanned and underfunded to get accurate counts.

That tracked data is the first step to containing any future coronavirus outbreak or future contagion, he said.

\"We need that investment and to be prepared,\" Scarpino said. \"Something like this will happen again in our lifetimes. We now have the power to put the systems into place to prevent the spillover to become a pandemic.\"

ABC News' Mark Nichols, Luis Yordan and Martin Karlin, a former economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, contributed to this report.

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