Today on the front its now officially a pandemic so how do you stop the spread of the corona virus and a year on from the massacre of muslims in christchurch how big is the threat from white nationalism. The corona virus has now hit every continent except antarctica on wednesday the World Health Organization officially declared it a pandemic so how do we stop it to discuss this im joined by Eric Feingold doing an epidemiologist and visiting scientist at Harvard Health economist and senior fellow at the federation of american scientists eric thanks for being on the show very rarely do we have a story like this that affects every corner of the world all of our viewers watching up front on almost every continent theres a tendency when we talk about story this big some people say you know what you guys are overplaying youre overstating your hyping it up the media is exaggerating and sensationalising what do you say to them i think theres absolutely no hype to this because weve been saying it for a long time weve been telling w. H. O. You need to clear a Public Health emergency over a month and a half ago the drug for several weeks it is just literally gone bonkers exponentially worldwide some people of the worried and i guess were going to see it play out now that if you call it a pandemic it causes more panic it further hits market it may stigmatize certain people from certain countries that was the argument i mean i think the w. H. O. Was even accused of exaggerating the 2009 swine flu and calling it a pandemic and those arguments are all dead theyre basically completely water on the bridge because its not that theres a stigma of where youre from a pandemic literally means worldwide theres almost equal risk. Infecting and in danger in every single country in the world so you mentioned kind of global the global context worldwide lips it to Harvard University happy to be able to you professor has been heavily quoted after saying i think hes revised numbers down but he originally said he thought 40 to 70 percent of the worlds population could end up being infected with covert 19 as its known in the next 12 months now whatever we argue about what the fatality rate is is it one percent 2 percent 3 percent less than one thats a huge number of people globally can you try to explain it is any kind of comparison analogy that we can make for that number of people to be infected so that number he clarified is now for adults but still a lot of it is incredible are people really and there are other people who basically you know Angela Merkel also came out with 70 percent of germany in the coming months as well this number is sound large but it is actually foreseeable if we dont do any containment in mitigation this is if we just let the virus roam around and be and do what the british Prime Minister baraks jumps in suggested recently i know thats terrible and there are some traders and then. Maybe everyone should get infected over the next month so it doesnt crash the market which is incredibly incredibly callous as a lot of people would die yeah its called death and and you know 20 percent of people have mild a mild this means still fever and you know a lot of coughing but 20 percent need hospitalization and of the 20 percent 5 percent actually need i. C. U. Just for the people watching at home maybe im being followed this closely maybe of listen to a certain president United States and say. Thousands of people die from the flu every year why is this any defeat is not just the flu and the anyone who says so is completely looting themselves in danger because aid we have half of you already have some partial immunity to flu this is a brand new virus no one has immunity there is a vaccine that works most of the time for the most strains of the flu there is no vaccine on the horizon they were here years ago yeah theres antiviral drugs tamiflu for the flu theres no antiviral drugs yet thats proven for this and its almost 2 times or 3 times as infectious and more importantly this virus can spread symptomatically which is you dont know you have a yes no you dont know you have and you can spread it even when you dont know you have it its when you have no symptoms and this is completely different from the previous sars so you wouldnt have it here at this table theoretically cigarillo 6 feet but no one shaking at the end but heres a question to you on the kind of mitigation and containment you mention the global what you do about are you going to pass that or you take steps were now seeing governors take varying degrees of steps so the Chinese Government going pretty early on in the u. S. Government the president playing golf not many tests have been done for quite a big population a big country in between you may have south korea for example which had a real problem but is seeing according to a lot of experts a lot of success yet bringing down numbers people even starting to use the word containment when you look at the global picture. Taken globally and its hard to do how well do you think the world is doing in pushing back against the i think the world collectively is doing a be mine a c. Plus for again there is a wide variation i think testing career is absolutely a Gold Standard but tests in the United States is absolutely abysmal and finally we have than enough kits but they basically said we have other another problem we have we dont have enough regents and chemicals to actually extract the samples so we can run the tests and another roadblock potentially for america actually getting a handle on this virus and america many other countries. Are literally in the dark and taking the ostrich approach in the so when you look at the introduction of just got some numbers here from as of march the 8th youve got south korea would 3 and a half 1000 tests per 1000000 you got the u. K. Would 350. 00 tests per 1000000 people pretty bad for the u. K. Comparatively and then you have the u. S. With 5 tests 1000000 people at all one how do you explain that discrepancy number to what kind of knock on effects as a half of one country is doing well but ones not absolute this is a serious problem u. S. Is 730 times below south korea because south korea levant its a lot of year that arent rich south korea the size of maine population the west coast Pacific States south korea literally has put all their National Resources and central core nature they run 15000. 00 tests a day drive through here strive to do america only as drive through in one location in seattle and because a lot of drive their restaurants and thats a restaurant that contributes a different type of morbidity but the issue here is the amount of tension without testing you need to testing to do Contract Tracing who are in contact to locking down isolation and thats why without that testing and the Investigative Team what work you cannot contain is epidemic when you look at whether its Prime Minister burroughs johns and say well maybe we should let it go through lots of hands or donald trump playing golf saying i dont need to get tested and my opponents are treating this new hoax for my opponent. Did these people potentially have blood on their hands i think so. Because of the village because Boris Johnsons own Health Minister already came down with cobra maintain the fact that youre not neglecting the testing and us had frozen testing for 22 and a half weeks that is almost 3 tough old higher multiplication is that in terms of cancers if you pointed out that there are people dead who might be alive had the governments handled it differently the last 6 weeks i am pretty confident that is the case because the u. S. Literally weve lost 3 cycles of multiplications would probably 8 x. Higher than our epidemic should have been had we had. For the u. S. The u. K. Other European Countries which seem to be slower than the chinese the japanese south koreans is it time to turn it around or is it too late i think there are pockets in which the United States this epidemic is not every single corner and yet some pockets like seattle has already run away infection potentially new york as well in l. A. But there the rest of the country there are still opportunities to prevent it from being a 50 state issue and how much do we change our lifestyles because in china they you know some scientists in the west are saying well the chinese are showing the way with a kind of model you do need to crack down on people Civil Liberties and freedoms in order to fight this do you share that view unfortunately i think in certain ways you have to do extreme social distancing at least a minimum like all the sports games public venues but draco nian this of china i dont know if they could they have the war on lockdown but they also have a residential lockdown for 750000000 people and you know you coffees when you say extreme social this is at the moment still voluntary please dont go to this place please stay at home please if you say where does the government step in and say you know what youre not allowed to do that we wont allow you to have gatherings of you know the 50 are we going to get to that point even in kind of quote unquote small son small cities and municipalities they already did that for example south by southwest the organizers in cancer. Austin declare an emergency and worse in the cancel we might have to do that if if literally they refused to cancel people who had thought that in the west and particularly at all about i dont 3 dylan government doesnt tell me what to do i dont think people have hit the reality of how bad this will be but when the reality hits and people realize it might be too late how bad will it be were about probably 3 or weeks behind potentially italy right now in the us i think it will be really bad because the us is very very poor ratings in terms of hospital beds per capita especially compared to many european and Asian Countries i think it will get really bad and we will overwhelm our i. C. U. Capacity this is why we have to flatten the curve until below the capacity of our hospitals but right without testing and containment the epidemic will way exceed our curve and that is when mortality will happen and people watching at home around the world we hear the advice wash your hands keep your distance is there any other advice that you would give someone whos following this closely. Keep to the containment containment is really key keep to the quarantines you know also avoid public spaces and try to really really distance yourself because washing hands is only as good as how far you are from how many contacts you are exposed to i think at this time we have to focus on self isolation we have to leave it there eric feigele doing thanks so much for joining us on outfront. Its been a year since the deadliest mass shooting in new zealand history when a white supremacist opened fire on 2 mosques in Christ Church killing 51. 00 muslim worshippers and injuring dozens of others since then across the world weve seen stabbings shootings the firebombing of mosques and attacks on synagogues just recently a racist attack killed 9 people in how germany and the Police Officer in the u. K. Was arrested on suspicion of terror related offenses so how severe is the threat from White Nationalists violence and can it be stopped joining me now to discuss this are Cynthia Millett drees senior fellow at the center for analysis of the radical right and author of the forthcoming book hate in the homeland the new breeding grounds for far right extremism and christian preacher leni a former neo nazi who now campaigns against the far right and is author of the book breaking hate confronting the new culture of extremism thank you both for joining me. A year ago this week a White Nationalist government massacred 51 muslims in Christchurch New Zealand shocking the world in the process question to both of you starting with you said this how shocked were you. I was shocked but not surprised i think is the best way to put it i think it wasnt at all surprising but of course it was shocking and yet horrifying and there were many dimensions of that which were different from previous kinds of attacks like the Live Streaming that kind of added that awful performance to you know an already horrific attack and christian youve been obviously talking about this immersed in this world for many decades youve been sounding the although you would have had conversations about this in the past as well how surprised were you you know you came out of new zealand i mean i think like cindy i was also surprised but horrified because it really did change the game you know the level of violence the number of People Killed the way it was live stream in the way that it had connections transnationally hose connected to other countries other organizations with the White Supremacist Movement i think was was really shocking just briefly on part about for viewers in what way was that connect to Trans National because we often talk about domestic terrorism implying its just local but its not you know known facts those alliances overseas have been forged for decades when i was involved in the White Supremacist Movement in the us from 87 to 96 we were already forging those connections in places like germany so i think that its ramping up i think that these connections overseas are starting to get more violent since it how much does new zealand teach as we know we had a manifesto we know like a lot of other people but does brave it the killer in norway almost a decade ago is a kind of inspiration to all of these people we often talk and weve talked on this show about kind of isis recruits going online connecting with recruiters or groups in syria how much of that could we mirror to the White Nationalist a White Supremacist Movement i think in many ways theyre very similar and i think that christchurch was a wake up call for a lot of people around the world in governments who were had been thinking of these as either kind of french subcultural problematic groups of youth or really purely domestic problems and it also shows how in many ways it does mirror some of the strategies that have been used by islamist groups. I think people are realizing that these manifestos the last couple of tax in germany either the Live Streaming on the manifestos were in english for a reason right these were not domestic german attacks they were it to any they were but they were designed to communicate to a larger audience and trying to speak to people outside of the country so christened you but should because of how it goes back even decades it was even when you were in the movement there was global links but you of course joined the White Nationalist group of the neo nazi groups in the late eighties i believe as you were 14 years old 14 how much has changed since when you look at the groups today and the groups youre studying today and some of the people with hearing about today in the u. S. And beyond how different is the scene today than it was in the eightys you know instead of glee its a lot different you know it was important for us when we were a Fringe Movement to be seen to terrorize people with the way we look the patches we wore the flags we waved but because of the Law Enforcement infiltration it became existential to that movement to hide to not be noticed and not be seen so i call it this kind of boots to suits movement where theyve ditched the be a static of what i used to look like 30 years ago and moved into looking more like you know the politician david duke was really one of the 1st people to do that when he got rid of the klan robe and put on a 3 piece suit of a politician and i was elected if i want to spend saturday her nerves either way far right activists in the us cynthia heres a question to what boots to suit is partly to do with Law Enforcement infiltration but also how much of that is to do with the fact that the ideology if we can call it that has been mainstream in a way that for example you know the isis ideology just by definition cant be mainstream whereas right now in the u. S. For example you have members of the governing Political Party that sitting on panels with these people taking money from these people saying nice things about these people very fine people i seem to remember i reraise you absolutely have seen a mainstreaming into ways that i think are really important for how this has helped the public find these ideas more except about. Or just less offensive they are less likely to raise the alarm about it one is that you do see mainstream politicians here and overseas echoing the same kind of anti immigrant islamophobia qantas emetic kinds of ideas or conspiracy theories thats really important to understand that when that sort of legitimizes but then we also see this static mainstreaming and i think thats a big transition from one question 1st came in that youre youre not seeing the kind of the shaved heads in the bomber jackets in the combat boots at the same time these are you know the khakis in the polo shirts and they look much more like the guys next door than the guys in the area and i dont see with. Tiki torches and right exactly im so thats much harder to recognize when you when you have that kind of aesthetic package people think like oh that those ideas might not be as dangerous from for example where you have Marine Le Pen who is now a leading candidate for the presidency came 2nd last time round in the u. S. You have don