Eh?

So what you said when you sat down was absolutely perfect that the timing could not have been better.

We'll tell everybody what you do, Michael.

Well, thank you.

Im ah, for a black of a better term of medical detective.

I've spent my whole career tracking infectious diseases down, trying to stop him.

Try, understand where they come from so we can make sure they don't happen in the first place.

But most of all, trying to respond to situations just like this, just like this.

And, um, just off the bat.

How serious is this?

Is this something that we need to be terrified of?

Or is this overblown, or how do you stand on this?

Well, first of all, you have to understand the timing of it in the sense that is just beginning.

And so, in terms of what hurt pain, suffering, death is a cat happened so far is really just beginning.

This is gonna unfold for months to come yet, and that's I think what people don't quite yet understand.

Um, what we saw in China, I'm convinced, as are many of my colleagues.

As soon as they release All of these social distances is mandated, stay in homes have left her home and weeks and weeks kind of thing when they go back to work there on planes, trains, subways, buses, crowded spaces, manufacturing plants, even China is going to come back again.

And so this really is acting like an influenza virus, something that transmits very, very easily through the air we now have dated to show that you're infectious before you even get sick and in some cases, quite highly infectious.

Just breathing is all that you need to D'oh.

So from this perspective, I can understand why people would say, Well, wait a minute.

Flu kills a lot more itself every year than this does.

And our remind people that just beginning probably the best guest what we have right now on what limited data we have to say.

This is gonna be at least 10 to 15 times worse than the worst seasonal flu year.

We see 10 to 15 times worse in terms of fatalities.

Yeah, yeah, just illness.

In fact, I just brought some numbers.

We conservatively estimate that this could and require 48 million hospitalizations, 96 million cases actually occurring over 480,000 deaths that can occur over the next 3 to 7 ones with this situation.

So this is not one that to take lightly, and I think that's what I can understand if you say we're going 10 deaths or $20 for 50 desk.

Just remember two weeks ago we were talking about almost no cases in the United States.

And now that we're testing for it and watching the spread as it's unfolding, those numbers going up astronomically.

Three weeks ago, Italy was just living life just fine.

Now they're literally in a virtual shut down in the northern parts of Italy, and that's the challenge.

With an infectious disease like this, it could spread very quickly, and it also can affect people.

I think maybe to put this into modern terms, this is something we think of often when we think of of, you know, pre antibiotic days.

You know, the old time medicine.

We have an employee at our Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the Inverse Minnesota, and she has a dear friend who lives in Milan, Italy, and she works at a hospital there, and she texted this to this employee of ours last night, and this was an email that came out yesterday from one of their physicians in the line at the largest hospital there, he said.

I just got a very disturbing message from a cardiologists at one of the Milan's largest hospitals.

They're deciding who they have to let die.

They aren't screening the staff anymore because they need all hands on deck.

And they have a very small areas of the hospital dedicated to non covert patient where they still screen doctors.

Everybody else is dedicated to covert patients, so even if they're positive, meaning that they're sick, they don't.

But they don't have a severe cough or fever than they have to work.

Hey says that that they're seeing an alarming number of cases in the 40 something change rage, and it's horrible cases.

So we need to stop thinking that this is only an old person's disease.

This is what I'm gonna unfold, not just in Wuhan.

It's unfolding in the line.

It's unfolding here in Seattle, and this is what's going to continue to Rolling Lee unfold throughout the world.

Yet where did this rumor come from?

That it's, ah, old person's disease.

Is it just because the majority of people that have died from it so far have been older?

Yes, in fact, that's the primary risk factor for dinos being old and then having certain underlying health problems.

For example, in China Ah, those men over the age of 70 who also smoked were 8 to 10% of them died.

65% of older Chinese men smoke the, uh, case fatality rate of the percentage of people who die and women, and that same age group was only about 2%.

In that case, very few women smoke.

Now the challenge we have is that that's the Chinese data.

But there are Siri's of risk factors that we worry about that if they overlay on this disease, are gonna cause bad outcomes, and we happen to be right at ground zero for one of the major ones here in this country.

That's obesity.

We know that obesity is just like smoking in terms of its ability to really cause severe life threatening disease.

And 45% of our population today over the age of 45 in this country are obese or civilian.

bees and their men and women.

So one of the concerns we have is we're going to Seymour of these.

But I guess I would call very serious and life threatening cases occur in our country because of different set of risk factors.

And we saw in China.

Now you mentioned that there's some sort of incubation period before people become sick.

They're still contagious.

What is this incubation period?

And how do we know about it when we calls something an incubation?

But we're talking about from the time you and I got exposed, meaning I was in a room breathing the air that somebody else who was infected with the virus was expelling out.

I breathed it in how long from that time period help the time period that you get sick And what is that is that's we called incubation period.

So that's when case numbers conduct or triple in every so many days in this case is about four days.

So and we actually have data there from people who are exposed one time for one time only, and we know when they were exposed where they were exposed, how soon do they get sick Afterwards, So the chauffeur in the car where an individual is sick showing symptoms than the chauffeur gets it four days later.

You know they were there one time one time.

And if the chauffeur does not show any symptoms, he's still contagious.

You could you could also be contagious, too, or he and that's one of the things that's challenging here is you and I might get exposed to somebody who is totally asymptomatic.

No symptoms.

That virus would appear.

Well, that's not a very strong virus.

But in fact, when it infects us, it could kill us.

So we've seen cases of fatal disease that were exposed to people that had minor symptoms themselves.

Wow, this is what's unfolding here.

And this is where I think it's such an important.

And I said, why the timing is so important?

Because, you know, Joe, we really got to get information out to the public.

There is so much mystery from information right now, and, you know, we're gonna be in this for a while.

This is not gonna happen overnight, and I worry.

I keep telling people we're handling this like it's a Corona blizzard.

You know, two or three days.

Romantic, Normal.

This is a corona virus winter, and we're gonna have the next three months or more, six months or more that are gonna be like this.

And you know, so far, this thing has been unfolding exactly as we predicted it.

We and our center put out a piece on January 20th and said, This is going to spread worldwide time People said, add No, it's just China.

We put out a piece the first week of February, said This is gonna pop probably the last week of February 1st week of March.

Because what happens?

It has.

What's called a are not or a doubling time of these every four days, so to increase is doubling every four days.

So if you go from 2 to 4 to 8 16 it takes awhile to build up.

But when you start going from 500 to 1000 to 6000 that's what we're seeing happening places like Italy.

We're beginning to see it in some ways, up in Seattle.

It's what happened in China, and you know, when people are confronted with that, suddenly this low risk phenomenon that every talks about isn't so low anymore, and that's we need to prepare people for now.

What can be done?

Like what?

What in the average person do I see people walking around with masks on wearing gloves?

Is that nonsense?

Largely, Yeah.

First of all, we'll step back.

The primary mechanism for transmission is just the respirator out.

It's just breathing.

In studies in Germany, which just have been published literally in the last 24 hours, they actually followed a group of people who have been exposed to somebody automobile manufacturing plant.

And then they had nine people that with this exposure, he said, if you have any symptoms will contact us, we want to follow the nail.

Agreed?

Well, they got infected.

And so in the very first hours, just feeling bad, Sore throat.

They went in and sampled the throats there, their saliva, their nose for virus.

They did blood.

They did stool.

They did you earn.

And they found that at that very moment, when they first got sick, they had incredibly high levels of virus, sometimes 10,000 times that we saw with stars in their throats, meaning they were infectious at that point already.

And they hadn't even had symptoms yet of really nature.

They were coughing you, and that's where we're concerned, because that's the kind of transmission it's, you know, I always have said, trying to stop influence virus transmission like trying to stop the wind.

You know, we've never had anything successfully do that other than vaccine and we don't have a vaccine here.

So what's happening is that people in public spaces air getting infected and the way you need to address that is unfortunately, if you're older over 55 you have some underlying health problems which, unfortunately, what Americans do, we have obesity.

Then right now, you don't want to be in large public spaces trying to potentially get infected so you can take care of that part as far as what can.

Public health?

D'oh!

We're not gonna talk about this.

We're not gonna have a vaccine anytime soon.

That's happy talk.

Um, what we you know, we can close schools one of the big challenges we have right now if we close schools what we accomplished in influenza fires when we close schools during outbreaks, because it turns out kids are get infected in school and they're like little virus reactors.

You know, they come home and transmitted to Mom and Dad and brothers and sisters.

And so we close school.

Sometimes it's Christmas.

Breaks are always great for kind of putting the dampening effect on flu.

In this case, kids are not getting sick very often all which is one of the really good news features of this disease into China.

Only 2.1% of the cases were under 8 19 years of age.

Why is that?

You know, we don't completely know Andi.

I'm gonna come back in a second because they're getting infected.

It turns out one study showed that they still get infected with the virus.

But they don't get sick.

And we have that happen.

There's a disease called infectious hepatitis, hepatitis A, where we have outbreaks and daycares.

And the way we know we have an outbreak is cause it's transmitted through the stool.

Fecal Laurel is Mom and Dad and the daycare providers all gets sick.

And the kids those symptoms would go on.

A test skids are all positive.

So some diseases will manifest my primary when your adult, but not as a child.

This one appears to be the same.

So do we close schools or not if we're not really spreading the disease?

Because it turns out that if we close schools, a recent study done showed that 38% of nurses today in this country who are working in the medical carrier have kids to school.

And if suddenly we're closed schools for two or three months, who's gonna take care of those kids?

1/4 of the American population has no sick leave.

If we close schools, they don't get paid if they have to stay home.

So when you ask, what can we do?

We have to really be thoughtful about what we do.

Are we doing more harm than good bye closing schools, for example?

Even everybody will say, Well, we got to do everything we can.

Or do we just tell people you know it's gonna be limiting your contact as much as you can, And that's really about what we can do and limiting the contact.

Is that really gonna help?

It does, because it's like putting rods and a reaction.

If you don't have as much close contact, you can not transmit as much if I'm if I'm sitting in a room with 100 people, and we're kind of sharing air.

The transmissions remarkable.

Right here off the coast.

California, you've got your cruise ship cruise ships and victorious for recirculating air inside the inner cabins.

We've had a number of outbreaks.

That's why they're having these outbreaks on cruise ships.

And then you leave them on there.

I think the cruelest human experiment we've done in a long time with you, Mrs.

Leave him on the ships.

Get him off right away.

Should they get him off?

Absolutely.

We'll deal with them.

Well, they can put him in quarantine of some kind if they want to follow up on him.