come on al-jazeera hi i'm steve clemons and i have a question has the coronavirus gotten out of hand in china and spread so far and so fast that it just can't be contained how vulnerable are we to global pandemics let's get to the bottom line. by the time we all heard of a mysterious new virus spreading in china the panic could spread worldwide with scientists rushing to figure it out millions of chinese citizens are under quarantine factories there are shut down in the virus has popped up in 26 countries as we speak it's killed more than a 1000 people and infected more than 40000 a whole cruise ship is quarantined off of yokohama japan right now and people are pleading to get off that ship so what's next and how afraid should we be fortunately we have 4 people with us today who have all the answers let me start with the 2 scientists dr lisa this is a leading researcher of infectious diseases in the senior director of infection prevention johns hopkins school of medicine dr lena when is a physician who teaches public health edgeworth washington university and is the former health commissioner for the city of baltimore and to discuss the wider impact of this story we have rob scott senior economist at the economic policy institute and joining us from the university of notre dame in indiana trying to expert good friend of mine professor joshua wiseman so glad to have you all with us today i please let me just start with you can you just kind of give us the dashboard of how we ought to be thinking about the coronavirus and what we're seeing in the world today give us the science and then tell us what is what is unfolding and whether we should be panicked. so our well i think we know that pandemic respiratory virus is one of the biggest threats that from an infectious disease standpoint that we have to be concerned about and this is a novel virus meaning that it is one that hasn't spread in humans before so that's one of the reasons that it causes a threat we don't have immunity in the human population to this virus it started and was 1st detected in mid december in china city and apparently spread fairly rapidly in that area and then expanded out to the who bay province people think that it came from this while the animal market is that is that right it was that baby. i mean it is a kind of market that i have not experienced but but tell us a little bit about the origins there sure so initial epidemiologic links were to this live animal market as you say and it apparently sells all kinds of. animals and coronaviruses are known to circulate not only humans but also animal populations and particularly bats and then there are other types of animals that can also carry coronaviruses so the thought now is that there was probably some intermediary species in that market or in the vicinity that had the corona virus and mutations in the virus can then cause it to be able to infect humans so this reminds me of a movie where you start out with a small you know outbreak of one person then it's 10 people but it's 100 then it's 10000 and there are new york times graphics out there that show that is this containable at this point so this virus has really spread further and wider than some of the other respiratory viruses that are in the same family the novel coronavirus is that we know as sars or murders sars emerged into charges what about 20 years ago 20022003 that was named for severe. acute respiratory syndrome. and that virus killed a lot of people and had a similar origin emerging from animals and spreading but it did not spread as far as so in total it was stopped after there were about $8000.00 cases and 800 deaths when you think about this in your experience both looking back at pandemics we've dealt with before again how what is the defcon level as you look it's hard to say and i think it is important to stress to all of our viewers that this is a relatively new virus that only came to our attention just over a month ago and there are a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how infectious it is how wide health far how quick it's going to spread we're beginning to have some ideas as lisa was saying that it does appear to have infected a lot of people fairly quickly but we don't know exactly what the extent of the spread is going to be it does look like there is a lot of community wide spread already a province where this originated in one city and who am now in singapore as well but we don't know whether our containment efforts in the u.s. and in other parts of the world are going to be effective and one of the stories out there is there's a guy who unintentionally spread this they're calling him a super spreader who went to the french alps people that he met in the french alps who went into my work and went on to the u.k. were both infected by by this person who also had gone to france in england that's just one person who went in and was able to generate that how many i know you have experiences of looking at these questions particular with baltimore and i also know there's the annual influenza which also has a lot of people one part of this is how sensationalized should this coronavirus be compared to the incidence of the average flu which affects millions of people each year so i think it depends on where you are right now in china the novel current. virus is a big issue it's a infecting tens of thousands of people the number of cases is rising rapidly there really needs to be contained in china it's a big concern in the us at this very moment the risk of corona virus is extremely low there have been what 12 cases or so of people in america who have been diagnosed with corona virus and you compare that to the 18000000 people who have been diagnosed with influenza just this season and the 10s of thousands who get killed every flu season from influenza in the u.s. so i think it is important for us to keep that in perspective that the risk to the average american right now is very low but this is an important virus an important epidemic to keep to keep a broad stuff of and aware of from the national and international perspective i mean what would you do if you were the mayor of china or the head of city health of china what would you do. i mean china has taken some extraordinary measures and i would argue late it does appear based on the reports that there was lack of transparency initially in reporting the new virus lack of transparency to the point of even censoring physicians who are trying to warn their fellow health professionals about this emerging virus and then and there's this unprecedented quarantine affecting almost 60000000 people right now i don't know that these are the that right now this type of aggressive approach is the right approach but it does appear that the chinese government has recognized the seriousness of this of this epidemic and i think what i would do was if it was a bit late. hard to say at that i mean just i mean i mean i mean when you look at i mean do we have we become so complacent about these things that now you look at the w.h.o. did not take this seriously on the front end and now they are but but look what's happened i mean i think it raises the question and i think frankly the importance of quote a virus today is not just coronavirus today it's how we deal with pandemics in general so that the w.h.o. screw up i think it's more of the chinese government should have been transparent from the very beginning about what they knew. international help in bringing assistance of the u.s. centers for disease control prevention and the assistance of the world health organization there's a lot in looking back that had they been allowed in they could've gotten a lot more information that could have curtailed the epidemic right instead of where we are now you say you're an audience fancy i am not saying i think that we have heard in recent days that there was a delay in accepting assistance international assistance from the w.h.o. from the centers for disease control from the united states and others who can assist in any time a country is dealing with this kind of an outbreak you really need all the help that you can get josh let me jump to you you know china well the decision making in china and i think the question the question is what do you think when it comes to trying these leadership positions either exacerbated or acted you know smartly with with relations given the benefit of the doubt perhaps that maybe they're doing whatever can be done but how do you read it as an expert on chinese decision making . well thanks steven it's great to be here with you you know i would agree with the other panelists at this point if you're the mayor of your primary question is what does the center want me to do which is a strange thing to be thinking in the middle of an epidemic so the problem here i find to be primarily political and that is the opacity of the chinese state fire of says disease fear rumors these things thrive in opacity and the chinese state is famous for that so we find ourselves in a situation where the information is in doubt where rumors are rampant. it is not the right political climate to handle an epidemic and i would completely agree with the other panelists on this and so the question then becomes is the communist party of china which leads china capable of evolving its governance in such a way that allows for the proper treatment of these kinds of things or is this a prelude to a further problem because we shouldn't forget that the swine flu epidemic has been ravaging china for almost a year now and it's been overshadowed now by this epidemic but that and the problems in responding to swine flu are reflected exactly in what we're seeing now with regard to humans so it's not surprising for those of us who study chinese politics that the there has been a lack of transparency on these issue and i guess you know now we've got the w h o on the ground at least in china i don't think they're even been allowed into 100 yet but this goes to the sensitivity of the chinese leadership in accepting foreign assistance and foreign guidance on things which they have deemed their internal affairs and so as long as we've got politicians rather than doctors leading this effort i'm concerned about the information coming out and i'm concerned about the our ability to respond properly to this epidemic josh i want to play for my panel in you a clip from senator tom cotton on the chinese government and the virus. china is still lying about all of this they've been lying about it from the very beginning and you don't need their history of lying about sars in 2003 that is relevant here you just have to see what's happened over the last 2 months josh do you believe the chinese government was lying from the outset. i think they may be lying isn't the right word they were perhaps trying to control the story they were trying to control it from a propaganda perspective such that it did not reflect the party in a bad light they didn't want the rumors to fly and so they tried to control the story and manipulate it but in doing so as we see from the death of dr lee and the 5000000 people who are said to have left on during the period where nothing was done or nothing major was done yeah i think this is this is a problem i have to agree with the senator on these issues but you know this is a lack of transparency and it's a political leadership which is placing politics above the health of the chinese people and so on until the chinese people's health becomes the number one priority not controlling the party not the image of xi jinping but simple health concerns i don't think we're going to see the kind of transparency we need and i think this is a problem around the world and of course we have health experts on the panel who could speak to exactly what that problem is but you know you had mentioned a moment ago this individual who flew to france and and all of this time was seems to have been wasted while the propagandists were thinking of the best story in the best line to tell so there's no doubt that there's been a problem here and the question is from sars in 2002 to swine flu over the last 2 years to this epidemic are we now seeing a pattern that is directly related to governance that we need to be concerned about and how does that reflect on china's image around the world especially among those developing countries those belton road countries that china is trying to woo i think that this this brings into question and calls into question their model of governance how fragile or not fragile is the position of being you know members of the state council in this are they feeling political he consequential from this from their own public or not. i would say not i guess my view on this is that the chinese state's security state apparatus is fully capable of even locking down 60000000 people and that the old thinking that we used to have about mandates of heaven are it's no longer relevant in this current security and technological climate so my sense is that cheating paying in the leadership may actually gain in terms of political consolidation of power from this i just don't see a way that this destabilizes the communist party of china and i think those concerns are overblown and i think we shouldn't be chicken little with regard to the political implications of this because and i can see it's just as easily coming to resound into the benefit of the parties desire to enhance its control as i can actually harming them and on the you know economic side i guess i'll leave that for now but politically speaking this could cut either way and i would hazard and i would urge people not to jump to conclusions on that. you studied the sars virus and the economic fallout from that you know whether it was there or not and i'd ask you 1st you know from your knowledge of looking at sars what insights should we gain from that in terms of looking at what the economic implications today are from the coronavirus i like to make 2 points in that regard 1st if you if you step back from 30 or 50000 foot level and think about the impact of this. over. 6 months or year what we see is it's very hard to detect an economic impact in the sars case there was almost no change in the rigor growth of china's g.d.p. and its unemployment. continued to grow in 2003 during the epidemic and for the next 7 years until the great recession began in 2002000 and so. no economic impact even in japan and i've also looked to the fukushima daiichi reactor disaster which was much more fundamental to japan's economy in that case. did knock. the japanese economy back for a year or 2 there was a there was a downturn in output and they raised the cost of energy and there isn't much that they had a public except that i mean i know there was a 15 percent rise in the cost of energy in japan after that exactly but there's also a supply constraint they have enough limited their ability to produce exports and as a result their trade surplus shrank for 2 or 3 years but in the end you're saying in the macro sense you know in america i know lots of people in the micro sense that are making the argument i know a lot of folks that right now that are supporting bernie sanders and elizabeth warren and they are out tweeting today about their worry that we have structural dependence on chinese producers chinese supply lines you know centrally supply drains for critical materials that might be needed in a health crisis like masks but that's you know 3 m. corporation in minneapolis makes these masks some they make here but a lot they make broad and there is this worry that we've become so intertwined with the chinese economy and supply chains elsewhere in the world that there is now a structural dependence that we can't extract ourselves and when it comes to who gets surgical masks if they matter oh i don't know what they call health masks what we call them lisa surgical magical masks respirator respirator mask that that we don't have what we need if this were to spread at the same scale and rate in the united states and china has significantly more exactly and i think this is a concern i mean you take for example the the auto industry china has become increasingly integrated in the auto parts industry and part of a huge global supply chain producing tens of millions of vehicles a year and that's going to be interrupted they've already shut down parts plants i know the electronics the foxconn plants have been shut down so it's going to affect . apple so there are going to be disruptions question news over the course of 3 months or 6 months. production just as it will shift plants will be double and triple shifted. will be made up by the end of the year but i think it goes straight to the 2nd point which i do suggest we're dealing with a different kind of an institution here as we. it's a state 1st and foremost protect its own interest. to manage the economy in the best possible way and it has both health and economic implications and i think there's a real cost that we didn't cost that we're now dealing with the decision to globalize the production system of particular to move so much. supply chain. production to china. and we're now extremely vulnerable to that and i think that's always true it's a problem. and let me ask you a question about the. border jumping josh yeah i'm sorry i wanted to jump in right on that point you know during the trial and we've seen a movement of supplies back into southeast asia and if you look at where the american trade deficit is it's increasingly again with other countries it's falling which china but it's increasing with other countries in the region so one could argue that this is going to catalyze that process of moving supply lines out of china so a process that has already begun is now being catalyzed even further and i would i would be more pessimistic then the previous guest with regard to the effect on the economy because this is not the china of 20022003 the economic juggernaut this is an economy which has seen some problems in the last few years and it has demographic problems that are only getting worse over time so i'm concerned about a perfect storm where this catalyzes the movement of supply lines outside of china it increases and can. eliza's these demographic problems and really produces a long term slowing of growth within the chinese economy so i'm a bit more concerned about the long term effects of this because it's compounded by all their economic and demographic aspects which i think make it more concerning than in 20022003 thank you for that lisa let me ask you a question about the vulnerability that we have systemically to beas kinds of situations when it's raised the question of how how prepared we are for the next virus from wherever it may come and when you think of you know you think of a bowl you think of others that are out there but i know for instance dr tony friend of mine for me and i often talking about invisible killers and our lack of preparedness and so how would you know how would you look at this question of preparedness and what we should be doing not only just for quote a virus today but the next thing coming down the pike that could be even even we have not a 2 percent death rate but have a 20 percent death rate there's a saying in public health that public health saved your life today you just don't know it that public health is all about the parent and preventing outbreaks to the point that we are successful when nothing happens and coronavirus and ebola and all these other cases that's when there is an album regular seen what happens when that contagion is not controlled and contained in the 1st place so i think we have come a long way the public health infrastructure is better overall certainly in the u.s. than it was 1020 years ago but we are facing a lot of deficits primari