Met daily and we continued that effort today. We added the head of health and Human Services as well as the v. A. First, a few basic facts. At the present moment, we have 43 cases of the coronavirus. Have returned to is days. Many are either in california or Washington State. Facing what experts tell us could potentially be a cluster in those communities. Four, today, there were additional fatalities, raising the number to six americans lost their life to the coronavirus. On behalf of the president , we extend our deepest sympathies to the families of those lost. Todays sad news, lets be clear. Peoplek to the american of the coronavirus remains low according to all the experts we are working with across the government. Mr. President has said we are ready for anything, but this is a all hands on deck effort. Today reflects the effort to bring the best minds of private industry together, the best leadership with a good meeting with governors from 50 states and three territories. I was able to convey the gratitude, particularly for governors dealing with coronavirus in their states, people who have taken repatriated personnel. Nationsar from the governors is that there has been a seamless relationship between the agencies, the government, and states. Am committed to a full partnership with state departments and their Health Officials going forward. We also met today with some of the leaders of the Top Pharmaceutical Companies in the country. The president spoke to them not just about vaccines, but just as importantly, the development of therapeutics. It is remarkable to think there may well be a vaccine going to Clinical Trials within the next six weeks. The nature of trials is the vaccine might yet not be available until late this year or early next, but therapeutics, giving relief to people that contract the coronavirus could be available by this summer or early fall. The most encouraging news is that pharmaceutical companies, which are recognized as the greatest in the world, have already formed a consortium to Work Together to share information in the development of therapeutics and vaccines. A quick update, yesterday, we were fully implementing the new travel advisories for portions of italy and south korea and the implementation of screening of personnel from across those countries who are going to who are working to take a direct flight to the United States of america. I was pleased to learn that within the next 12 hours, there will be 100 screening, all direct flights, at all airports across italy and across south korea. The president has directed us to bring the full resources of the federal government and to bring the best minds of this country to bear on this effort. Finally today, i am pleased to welcome to our White House Team a world renowned Global Health official and a physician. She will be my right arm through this effort as the president has tasked me to lead the white house response to the coronavirus. I am grateful the ambassador deborah burks, also dr. Deborah burks will be on our team and even on her first day, she has been contributing significantly to our discussion. She serves as the u. S. Governments leader for combating hivaids globally and has developed an international reputation. She is a scientist, someone with three decades of Public Health diseases, including vaccines, and has vast experience in interagency coordination. We have talked about the importance of bringing all of the various entities together to bring about president trumps vision for a whole of government response to the coronavirus. With that, i would like to recognize dr. Deborah burks for a few introductory and welcome remarks and thank you for stepping up one more time to serve our country. Dr. Burks thank you, mr. Vice president. I just arrived from south africa last night. It shows the level of efficiency and expertise here to get moving quickly. It is clear the early work of the president , both travel restrictions and the ability to quarantine has bought us the time and space to have this task force be very effective. I have never worked with such incredible scientists and thoughtful policy leaders and i got to spend the day with them. I am trying to get up to speed and i look forward to the days ahead, really working together to end this epidemic. Thank you. Thank you, mr. Vice president. I want to start off by saying how delighted we are that ambassador burks will be coordinating these efforts across the government. Dr. Burks and i go back. Dr. Burks and basically every leader that the department of health and Human Services away back together. We have established relationships. We have established, working productive relationships to keep the interagency process working smoothly. Dr. Burks has been asking the right questions and challenging us on all the right scientific and policy matters we need to focus on. I want to begin by recapping the Current Situation we face with covid19. As of this morning, we have 43 confirmed cases of the virus in the United States excluding our repatriated cases. 17 of those cases are travelrelated in one way or another. 26 are believed to be persontoperson spread. Because of the president s strong leadership and all the hard work our Public Health professionals have done, the immediate risk to any individual american has been and does continue to be low, but the risk for people with possible exposure to identified cases can be high. What every one of our experts and leaders have been saying for more than a month remains true. The degree of risk has the potential to change quickly, especially if we see sustained spread of the disease around the world which could qualify this disease as a pandemic. We will see more cases of Community Spread in the United States. As we emphasized for some time, we all need to prepare for the potential need, prepare for the worst, hope for the best. In some places, we will have to use the range of our mitigation efforts. We already are working closely with Santa Clara County and the state of washington, and king county, to assist them in thinking through best practices for our pandemic action plan, as well as learning from singapore and hong kong among the best efforts such as temporary School Closures or even, other responses, such as having school, but perhaps not having assemblies. That is why the president has taken an unprecedented whole government approach to protecting the American People, including the steps in the last few days to radically expand and improve the testing and access to respirators needed by health care workers. The Vice President of the cdc and i spoke with every governor we have this morning and we greatly appreciate their close cooperation with us. I want to introduce an individual i asked the Vice President to join this task force because the centers for Medicare Services play such a vital role, 1. 3 trillion of spending, providing health care to 60 million american seniors. As we have seen, this disease can have a disproportionate severity impact on the elderly and medically frail. Seema verna, our administrator has an important responsibility with regard to funding of care, whether therapeutics, vaccines or diagnostics for senior citizens, but also in regulating longterm care facilities such as Nursing Homes and other Health Care Facilities. I am delighted administrator verna is joining the task force. Ms. Verna thank you, secretary azar. For the Trump Administration and cms, patients come first and the health and safety of America Patients and provider workforce is our highest priority. Let me start with what the secretary said, we are the largest insurer, covering 130 million americans between medicare, medicaid and the individual insurance market. Some of these our our nations most vulnerable populations, the elderly, those in poverty and children. We have a regulatory responsibility for pretty much every Health Care Institution in america. This includes hospitals, critical access hospitals, Nursing Homes, dialysis facilities, surgery centers, the list goes on. That gives us a Critical Role in addressing the coronavirus. We are responsible for enforcing quality guidelines based on information from Partner Agencies like the cdc. Let me stress cms has longstanding Infectious Disease policies in place that we have used effectively for other outbreaks such as influenza. Health care facilities already have these procedures in place and should be prepared for what they may see. We will continue to proactively update our regulations. We will be working with the cdc. Those are already in place and it is our job to make sure Health Care Facilities are effectively implementing those guidelines. We will work with the cdc to determine whether we need to update or change those. We are looking at what we cover in clarifying the types of products and services our programs will pay for, in terms of medicaid and medicare. With that, i will turn it over. Vice pres. Pence i want to recognize a couple other members of our team. From the National Institute of health. Thank you, mr. Vice president. I want to make three comments and points. To underscore what the Vice President and secretary azar said, we had an extraordinary meeting with ceos, individuals in pharmaceutical and biotech industries. They were already actively collaborating with and were enthusiastic about helping us along with the development of products and availability, vaccines, antibodies, it was very gratifying. Second, i am very pleased the president and Vice President will be visiting tomorrow and we will have an opportunity to show them in real time the types of things we are doing. And one comment about ambassador, dr. Burks. Couple of people said we go back a long time nobody goes back as long as i go with ambassador burks. She was a fellow in my program as a trainee and we knew she was a star. What has happened over the years, she has become a superstar. Together we saw the first patients with hiv in the 1980s. We were involved in the First Successful trial with hiv. We have known each other i have had the privilege and honor putting together a program for president bush, and she was the ambassador in charge. I cannot tell you how excited i am to finally get back to being a partner with debbie burks. Vice pres. Pence thank you, dr. Fauci. Finally, dr. Bob redfield, cdc. Dr. Redfield thank you, mr. Vice president. The cdc continues to provide support, the backbone of our Public Health system, state, local, Tribal Health departments. These teams continue to work to identify new cases, isolate to Work Together to try to limit the transmission of the coronavirus. Working with our Public Health partners, we identify new Community Cases, as the secretary said. We always anticipated. And use assets to aggressively confirm those cases, isolate, to use our Public Health tools to limit the spread of this virus. I want to echo what was said by the Vice President and secretary that despite seeing these new Community Cases that show you we have a Public HealthCommunity Across this country in action, the risk to the American People is low. I also want to add i am looking forward to the president and Vice President and secretarys visit to come to atlanta friday and meet with the wonderful people that form the backbone of this great agency. Thank you. Vice pres. Pence steve holland, reuters. Based on what we have seen so far, how quickly do we expect this virus to spread throughout the United States . Vice pres. Pence let me refer that to the experts. Are there are details about the cluster in Washington State . The important thing is, from the beginning we have anticipated Community Cases pop up and now we have a number of new Community Cases which the Health Departments are aggressively evaluating to see if they can understand the linkage, who are the contacts, how is it spreading . The American Public should rest assured we have one of the finest Public Health programs in the world when you look at state and local territorials. We will continue to see these cases as a consequence of them doing their job and we will use Public Health strategies to limit that transmission. We should focus on that. We are working hard to contain these community outbreaks. As the secretary has said, we are blending that with mitigation strategies. To underscore something i said the other day, there are two aspects of this, cases coming in and controlling the situation of what is already in here. There are two things going on, restriction of travel to areas that are hotspots and the rest of the world, just like the original inhibition of travel with china i think will mitigate against the question of the wider spread aggressively going wider spread and Contact Tracing that is aggressively going on. I think what is going on with the cdc in particular, it will with the will Health Authorities really get us through this. Vice pres. Pence steve, something i learned along the way, when we have cases that emerge, state and local Health Officials are in the lead, but cdc is on the ground immediately helping to identify how that might originate with that individual, to find out any other people they may be exposed to. We know there will be more cases. The president took unprecedented action to do all he could to prevent the virus from coming into the country and now we are focused on mitigation of the spread as well as treatment of those affected. Kristin fisher here . She walked out . Let me go with haley jackson. Two questions. President trump hinted today the potential for new travel restrictions going to italy, south korea, china, iran. Can you elaborate on all the countries you are looking at . Is germany on the table . Vice pres. Pence the president is very clear, we are going to follow the facts and listen to the experts every step of the way. The action the president authorized this weekend, raising the travel advisory, the American People should know we are saying you should not travel to certain sections of italy or south korea. Those advisories may expand, but we will allow the caseload in those countries to define that. In addition to that, by establishing screening protocol which will be in full force the next 12 hours in both countries, we will ensure anyone traveling on a direct flight to the u. S. Receives multiple screenings at all airports from italy and south korea. To your point, the nature of the European Union does not require a passport to move around. Our task force spoke today about new cases, and there were some in several european countries. We are following that closely. We will listen to experts and watch the cases and i know the president will make decisions with regards to restrictions on basis of those facts. Do you, do your experts, do you consider this a pandemic in designation . Vice pres. Pence i would refer to the experts. Our view is that would be for the World Health Organization to define. Our Task Force Team was in touch with the World Health Organization today. Let me let the secretary address that. This is not about semantics. Our briefing was that it is in more than 60 countries at this point. We are going to continue to focus on ensuring we do all we can to prevent people coming into the country with the disease to mitigate any spread of the disease, and of course to provide treatment. Mr. Azar i spoke with the Incident Manager for the World Health Organization about this question. I wanted to get a sense of how they are assessing the designation of pandemic status. At the moment what we are seeing, Community Spreading in multiple regions of the world. There are many definitions there are many definitions people use around pandemic and one issue the who is focused on is sheer magnitude. We had large numbers of cases within china. The absolute number of cases outside china are not of the magnitude comparable to any pandemic before. Even the h1n1, when you have billions of individuals infected across the world. That is how they are thinking about this and we will keep working with them. We do not have a view whether they should designated a pandemic or not. I wanted to get a sense what they were thinking about. It is reflective of their current thinking. I asked them if they could put out points about how they are assessing it. Vice pres. Pence good answer. How about ben with abc. On screening passengers from italy and south korea, what would that screening look like . Is that taking temperatures, every single passenger, who is conducting it . How many tests have been conducted . Last week i believe we heard 3600. What is the update . Vice pres. Pence pence our state department is in an interagency brief and is worked out that arrangement with italy and south korea. South korea about three hours ago implemented screening on all direct flights, all airports. As i mentioned, within the next 12 hours or so, italy will have implemented the same thing. It will be multiple temperature checks in the airport for people before they are boarding and we are working very closely to assist them in implementing that. He can speak you about the status of tests. One thing i heard from governors last week was the issue of test kits, the availability. I want to commend dr. Han and the fda for making many more kits available and authorizing local testing which will now make it possible to identify additional cases. As we find more cases, it will mean Health Officials are doing their job in large part and the availability of those tests will contribute to that. As you heard from the secretary and Vice President this weekend, we have the capacity to perform between 75000 and 100,000 tests. Saturday, we issued new policy allowing us to have regulatory flexibility. Academic centers, private companies can develop these tests, tell us they validated those tests, and use them. They alert us of that and within 15 days we can look at validation data. They are having a responsibility to show the validation. With this new policy we have heard from multiple companies and Academic Centers and we expect to have a substantial increase this week, next weekend throughout the month in tests. The estimates we are getting, by the end of this week, close to one million tests will be able to be performed. We are talking about risk. They came out and said the risk is low, but with so few tests being done and the incubation rate being as much as two weeks, how can we accurately say the risk is low at this point . If you talk about the entire country, 360 Million People in this country, the risk is low. The point youre making, since we have not done it yet, but it will happen soon, testing in the community, how do we know the risk is low . I imagine it still is going to be low regardless of that. What happens in real time is that things can change. The right now, today, monday, if you look at the country as a whole, the risk is low. Vice pres. Pence go right ahead. Many are worried about spring break, wondering if they should book travel or cancel. What is the Expert Opinion on spring break travel, even domestic travel, and would you yourself feel comfortable bringing your family, including your three grandchildren and their partners on a weeklong trip to disney world . Vice pres. Pence i can say there has been no recommendation on any limitation on travel within the u. S. But let me let the experts speak to recommendations with regard to travel. Would you feel comfortable bringing vice pres. Pence i travel across this country all the time, my kids live all over the country. This is a time to use common sense. A good time to wash your hands. This time of year, that is always a good decision. As we said, the risk remains low. While we have had a tragic losses, four today, the reality is, 29 of the 43 domestic cases are in california and Washington State and are centered in very specific areas we are working to identify the source on. I think people should continue to use common sense this time of year. With regard to international travel, let me appeal to the expert. I wantnce to echo what the Vice President said. We want people to go about and live their normal lives in this nation. The secretary is right. Even before the coronavirus, if you asked the cdc what you should do about preparedness, we would say every individual should think ahead and prepare. Whether it is a hurricane. Those recommendations have not changed. I want people to reflect that. There are no travel restrictions in the United States. The cdc and state Department Task force have worked hard to recognize those areas where there is Significant Community transmission where we give you advice we would recommend you not travel. You know china is that. We now have south korea as a level three, italy, japan and iran. There are level 3 travel advisories we would ask you to reconsider those travel plans. But in the United States, there are no travel restrictions. I want to echo what everyone said. The risk to the American Public is low. We will increase substantially surveillance. Similar to what we do for flu. We have multiple Surveillance Systems with dr. Hahn and the fda getting more tests out. We will have eyes on any new evidence international to travel, we just will continue to monitor the cases. We will follow the facts, the experts, and the science to determine whether additional travel advisories or restrictions are warranted. That being said, folks, we are going to slip out. We will be back let me tell you, we will be back here if i may, we will be back here every day. Get used to seeing us. We are going to bring the experts in. We will make sure to give you the best and most highquality realtime information. The best people in the world. Thank you all for being here. You are welcome back anytime. [chatter] negotiations continue on capitol hill over emergency funding for the coronavirus response. Leaderstoday, Senate Mitch Mcconnell and Chuck Schumer spoke about the effort. The new coronavirus or covid19, continues to capture headlines over the weekend. News of the First American deaths related to the disease confirm this is a Public Health challenge that is upon us. We need to support the federal, state, and local public Health Officials and Health Care Professionals who are working