I want to start with you.

You called What happened on the Diamond Princess Cruise ship?

Quote one of the cruelest human experiments you've seen in your entire career.

Truly one of our public health.

Lesser moments.

What is your reaction to what you saw on the cruise ship and the American public Health officials Decision making around it.

Well, first of all, they should have come off the ship.

In the very earliest days, we have worked up many different cruise ship outbreaks of other infectious diseases where we know that viruses are actually transmitted through the air.

Inside these cabins in the ship, there's very, very poor air circulation recirculation problems.

And so what should have been a surprise that by putting them on there and keeping in mind there, that this was going to happen.

So I think there are a number of us And you may recall, Meg, Even three weeks ago, we talked about the need to get them off the ship at that time.

And so I think I'm glad they're off.

I think it's really important, but I think every cruise ship where there's a case like this right now the first thing you do is get people off the ship.

Don't keep him on it, Dr Gottlieb.

But what did you make of the comments there from Dr Fauci about his level of confidence that we're not seeing cases spread across the US unknowingly at this state?

Well, we can hope that that's right.

Meg elicited a key detail that the six cities that they're gonna be doing what they call central surveillance trying to look at cases of diagnosis of fluid.

The patients don't actually test positive for flu, but looks like influenza like illness.

And see if it in fact, could be Corona virus.

Those samples are not gonna be sent back to the CDC, so that's gonna dramatically limit the number of sampling that they're gonna be able to do because the CDC lab is limited.

How many samples that they can run?

They might be better off rather than taking a random sample, which is probably what they're going to be doing.

Just letting doctors around the country send suspicious cases to the CD seeks.

I'm sure that there's physician seeing in determining cases of severe pneumonia that look suspicious with aren't explained by influenza or other other pathogens that they're able to test.

For that they'd like to be ruling out Corona virus in this environment.

Dr.

Osterholm, the case numbers, or at least the test numbers we've seen from the CDC imply they've probably only They have only tested fewer than 500 people in the United States.

Do you think that this could be circulating undetected here?

Well, first of all, take a step back.

The case numbers that we keep reciting every day are really not very meaningful in the sense that we're getting a grab sample of the people who are infected out there and testing those.

And so we put far too much precision to these estimates.

I think right now the bottom line messages that this virus is acting just like an influenza virus is transmitting just like it.

We see many of the same dynamics around the world with that, and no one has ever been able to stop it.

Influenza virus with containment.

It's like trying to stop the wind, and so to me, I am quite convinced that we'll continue to see widespread transmission.

It would not surprise me to see transmission that has ongoing here in the United States in the 1st 2nd or third generations were even 32 or 64 cases of resulted from one person.

But remember, 80% are mild to asymptomatic.

Illness is giving you on Lee out of that 32 maybe three people that would actually be hospitalized.

So I think that the challenge we have right now is in fact getting the kind of testing done that Dr Gottlieb just mentioned and getting those results.

I don't tell us what's happening, doctor.

Awesome.

Because it's so hard to stop it from spreading.

You think it's much more important to treat people once they have it and stop the level of the illness elevating well, first of all, again, we don't have ah repertoire of treatments that are going to be all that effective beyond supportive care.

And surely that can be important.

I think the most important thing we have to do right now is back off this concept.

We're gonna contain it and get people to concentrate on what I call mitigation.

We need to right now beef up our protection for health care workers in our country and throughout the world.

Look what's happened in China.

Look at the outbreak in Italy, where just a few cases we already have five health care workers that are infected.

And once we lose those frontline soldiers against this fight, then we're really in trouble because they not only are no longer care providers, but their care required providers.

And that's what we really are concerned about.

So we need to make sure we have the great respiratory protection, the kinds of things that protect them, so that they can keep providing medical care.

That's what we need to be concentrating on right now.