Coronavirus p they write that today larry kudlow has confirmed that the administration is considering timely and targeted federal interventions to help workers, firms, and industries heard by coronavirus as fears mount over the growing Economic Impact of the spreading out. Read more at washington post. Com. Thentil 1 30, when briefings get underway, we will show you more from todays washington journal. This is dr. Christopher morris of George Washington university, the Global Health professor here to talk about the global and u. S. Coronavirus response and everything related to that. Good morning, sir. Guest thanks for having me, pedro. Host what is the perception of what is going on with the kiwanis virus the coronavirus and what is the reality . Guest there is so much around this about what is true and what is just rumor. Without getting really clear messaging from our top leaders, it is tough to understand the right calibration for preparedness versus fear, versus confidence. This is something that it is a it willw virus, and take time to get our hands and our heads around it. Host in terms of what . What is the administration not providing as far as leadership . Guest the entirety of the Public Health response needs to be more robust and direct, in terms of talking to people about what is their role in this, what is the officials role, and what can we expect going forward. There is a lot of room for some leadership messaging in terms of what we are doing about diagnostics, travel bans and restrictions, what is the future portending for the outbreak, and what can people do in their everyday lives . Rogue messaging about isolating yourself and taking care of handwashing and not touching your face. That is true, but people need more than that. Host when it comes to the virus itself, is part of that information provided as far as what it is exactly and how much it spreads and the rate it spreads and the things we dont know on those fronts . Guest it is not being delivered at this point because we do not know how to package that up yet and how far ahead of the data we can go confidently to develop it. We look at experiences in other countries, certainly china was a main experience we had to work with, but now we can look at data coming out of south korea, italy, europe, and the u. S. As well p that tells us more about what we can expect in terms of the ultimate more billet morbidity and every day we get new numbers, new ideas about which way this thing is pointing, and i think we need to make sure we are moving along and advancing that so that people can have confidence that we are developing a plan. Host what do you take from the numbers come as far as we are heading particularly in the u. S. . Guest the numbers are certainly troubling. We look at the china experience and their numbers are coming down. A lot of folks i talked to, especially in the marketplace, they are seeing that as a positive. It looks like the china response has broken from the transmission chaining over there. We look at the rest of the world and it is growing quite rapidly. It is spreading geographically and the numbers are going up and up. So this is this is a balance. Can we make our response robust enough to do something perhaps or is that not something that will be in our toolkit because they have a much different approach available to them then we have in most of the rest of the world. So i think at this point, really what we need to do is get our own numbers as best we can. Has involves everyone been saying a lot more diagnostic testing going on so that we can really calibrate what is going on in our communities, whether or not we have an opportunity to contain, or if we drop back and look at this thing in a broader way. I guess well be with us until 9 00. If you want to ask questions about coronavirus exposure in the United States and the 202al response, it is 748, 8000. When it comes to the kits, can you describe them . Also the amount of kits that guest i have not seen the kit handson myself, but i have used these in the past and it is a direct detection of virus genome in the sample they take from people. Some of the problems were clearly that it was complicated to some degree in terms of how individual labs would validate the results. They have tried to make repairs to those from the cdcs point of view and now we are waiting to receive those in a much broader scale to state and hospital labs so we can get the testing rolling. The delays there i am not sure what is causing that. There is a lot of consternation in the Public Health community about what is taking so long, and there is concern about, is it all the way correct at this point . Are we going to receive something that will be available and let us get through the testing slog that we have on backlog we have at this point . There have been emergency authorized products by fda that will allow program let some producers provide alternative kits. Those have not been validated either necessarily to the point that we prefer, but at this point we need more or less everything we get our hands on it we will have to do the validations, kind of, in flight, to see if some are better than others. Kits have been developed all around the world for this response, every country either counting on what the who has provided or relying on their own. There will be a number of experiences we can pull from. Hopefully we will find the best solution. One of the most critical things is trying to get the test time down to as short as possible and out to as close to patients as possible. The quicker we can do those two things, the better we will understand the outbreak, the trajectory and the scope. Host what is the turnaround time for getting the test administered and the results . Guest the results we are hearing about coming out of state laboratories and cdc, that still seems like we are looking at 24, 48, even 72 hours. I am sure that could be cut down as things became more efficient, but the fact is that it probably takes about three to four hours. That does not even include getting the sample prepped. Host you talk about taking those test on the fly are you worried about the and result or the information given is valid or accurate or the degree to which it is accurate . Guest we want the best test possible, but at this point, it will not make a real difference in terms of how a patient with severe disease is being treated. This is about understanding the scope of the outbreak. At some level, we can forgive a little bit of test performance if we at least get some results that help us understand just how widespread this thing might be. Host when it comes to the coronavirus itself, we have had several people call into the program over the last several weeks as we have been talking about this and saying, we already have influenza, it kills a number of people every year, why are we so concerned about this virus when we already have influenza . Guest it does a disservice to the situation to compare it to influenza. The comparison stops of the fact that it is a respiratory born, highly transmissible infection. The key differences here the totality of the worlds population is susceptible there is no preexisting immunity. No one has gotten a vaccine. Everyone is able to be infected with this thing. With this thing. That provides a lack of back pressure on transmission. Then when we look at all the different data streams we have to try to calibrate fatality rates, we see a number of different scenarios play out. Just a couple of days ago, the head of who came out with a dramatic statement of something north of 3 . That would be devastating on a global scale. Seasonal flu is on average to on average, estimated to have a fatality rate of. 1 , so that would be many, many times higher. When i look at the south korean data, they are Holding Steady at about. 6 , and they are doing a robust diagnostic push that is not just looking at sick people. It is across the community. That might be a good estimate if we take into consideration the mild cases or asymptomatic cases occurring inside this outbreak. Talking about six times seasonal flu. That is a big number. Seasonal flu on average, it is 37000 andahalf dying every year. Six times that is a big number. Host randy is texting us. The big thing, he says, i have not seen a dress, if you get the virus, can you get it again . Or are you and moon . Or argue immunity . You immune . Guest the expectation is you would be immune, but we do not know about the virus and the immune response. This was one of the many things we have to understand and be on the watch for. The zika outbreak, the ebola the zika outbreak, the ebola outbreak, they taught us to be careful of our dogma and understanding what we think we know. Everything is on the table until we can take it off. Host another text this morning from bakersfield, california, asking, if you would gauge the u. S. Response versus the way south korea responded, if we are as ready as south korea was . Guest south korea also had delays built into their response. They should have been on top of it sooner. But they changed their posture quickly and now i think their response is a bellwether for what the rest of the world should be trying to do. Host lets go to calls. This is tom from iowa. Youre up first for our guest, dr. Christopher mores from George Washington university, a Global Health professor. Tom, go ahead. Caller yes, i have a question and a concern we have prebooked flight tickets from chicago to San Francisco on may 20. I am very concerned. I know we will wear surgical gloves and masks on the flight and try to avoid groups of tourists, but we are really concerned about that and would like your opinion. Guest it is a common question and a common concern. I think Everyone Needs to be thinking about is it the best time to be traveling. Can i push this off . Certainly, i would recommend training yourself before you go on any travel, keep your hands away from your face, keeping good hand hygiene up, washing, using hand sanitizers it is not something you can do right off the bat, im on a plane, i should not be touching my face. It takes a long time to change the behavior. It is something should be trying to do how often do i reach up and rub my nose or my eyes . Those are moments you can possibly contaminate yourself. Host we have the cruise ship off the coast of california not been able to dock. Is that a proper response from the state in your opinion . Guest if you notice there is a lot of transmission going on in a particular community or a ship like that, not letting them just disembark is a good idea, but holding them on a ship without appropriate supplies, quarantines, Infection Prevention control support that is where some of those ships have run into significant trouble. There is a good way to do that and a bad way to do that and i think it is all in how it is executed. Host keith is up next. Keith in fargo, north dakota. Good morning. Caller i was just wondering where did coronavirus get started from . Guest it is a brandnew virus. It has been implicated in a market in wuhan, china, that did sell wildlife products wild animals. The idea is it is an animal disease that has found an ability to be spread in man, so sometime in recent history that virus made the jump into us, and it reminds us that we have to be careful about our intersection with wildlife, how we treat it, and this is one of the consequences of not paying attention to those warnings. Host a viewer off of twitter this morning asking, how do you determine nonsymptom cases and do we test the entire population . Guest to get an ace of the medic fraction, you have to do a broad diagnostic push and youre not just looking for sick people, just doing this in clinics. You are trying to understand what is the totality of this transmission iceberg, as people say. That is important because we need to understand how much is going on in the community, because that will then let us know where there are maybe risk groups we need to protect before it gets there. It will also tell us more about calibrating expectations for how many people get sick and how many people will die of this thing. Host another viewer asks a question off of twitter saying, is or any evidence the coronavirus leaves permanent damage to internal systems, which results in permanent physical impairments such as blindness . Guest i have not seen any data in terms of longterm followup of survivors. That is certainly something that needs to be watched for carefully, but there is nothing to suggest that is going on at this point. Host bee in texas. Good morning. Caller i have a twopart question. We are not hearing anything about mexico, and i live near the border, and i am really old. I have this question about why are we not hearing what is happening in mexico with all the people waiting to come into the United States, and the other question i have dont you think it is strange that all of a sudden china immediately jumped on starting building hospitals, putting people in quarantine, we are sitting here watching, and all of a sudden it is all over the world . I mean, come on. Is it airborne . Thank you. Every country has its own response. There have been a lot of the same problems as we have in this country. Do they have the capacity, technology to pull it out . Do they believe it is a threat, do they need to take it as seriously as countries that are nearer to the outbreak zone . It is a patchwork of responses. We cannot force anyone to have a necessary response that i believe we need to be having. In terms of the chinese response to the outbreak, they really did an amazing job mobilizing National Resources to respond to the outbreak in wuhan, and certainly a lot of the world responded with travel restrictions and limitations in an effort to isolate china and that area of china from being able to contaminate the rest of the world, but since that time has long passed, it is important that the rest of us get on with our preparations. Host this is bob, bethlehem, pennsylvania. Caller good morning, doctor. Host you are on. Go ahead, bob. Caller good morning, doctor. I have a question pertaining to ebola. When they took patients that recuperated, they had their antibodies in their serum, and used that as a way of fighting previous people that could come down with ebola. Is there anybody looking into the effectiveness of the serum inside of the people that have recuperated . Looking forward to your answer. Guest i am not aware of any passive antibody from people that have survived the infection being used to protect people going through it now. We have used that in other passengers and other pathogens over the years. It was not terribly effective for ebola virus, and there are reasons to believe it might not be the most effective therapy here for respiratory virus where a lot of the infection is happening in lung space, which is difficult to get the antibody to that you would otherwise delivered intravenously. Host jim in texas asked the question, there are reported to be two strains. Which are we see a . Can you compare the two . Guest this is brandnew, and i must say i have not looked at the data on the definition of these two types. It is something we need to be aware of in terms of this is a brandnew virus. It is going through its initial rounds of infection in the human population and it will be mutating as it goes. We need to be aware of the possibility of different types to arrive. Host jen from seattle asked, is it more likely that people recover than die . Guest absolutely. Since this is mainly a mild disease, most people will recover if they have symptoms at all. We are worried about the top fraction of people that have preexisting conditions or advancing in years. Those are the ones we are more concerned about the recovery status from the virus. Host again, our guest is from George Washington university, a Global Health professor here to answer your questions about coronavirus. This is deborah, west chester, ohio. You are on. Go ahead. Caller thank you for taking my call. Im a retired microbiologist and i am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to you because my question is focused more on the future. You know, in china, they have a different culture in the United States regarding food safety. You can have a pigpen in the back of a restaurant. In the United States, you cannot store raw meat above fruits and vegetables. In china, they have been affinity for taking live animals and they have live animal markets. When you combine that in a city of 11 Million People like in wuhan, and you look at their culture, and you look at the pig, one of their favorite Animal Protein sources, which is a mixing vessel, as you know, you really have to ask yourself, is that a practical their culture and population is not a good fit. It is an ideal fit for an emerging virus, especially from animals to people. I am wondering, since this is your field, im wondering if the World Health Organization in combination with the wto should not be establishing standards for our supply chains. Is it really smart . Host thank you, deborah. Guest it is certainly something we dont really do or allow here in the states or number of other western countries. But really here, i think the issue is the demand exists, so will this outbreak change that demand within the cultures that use wild animals, bushmeat, or slaughter to table practices. That is something i have seen a lot of Media Coverage on, and it might be changing because of this outbreak alone. Host you might have seen Media Coverage of a picture going around, cans of lysol, the coronavirus is listed on that. What do you gauge when you see that kind of thing and what should you be telling people about lysol . Guest these products all have some ability to serve as a disinfectant, and this is an envelope virus that is readily disinfectable by a lot of these products. It is not incorrect. I think what we have to be aware of how important is the surface versus the respiratory protection versus social distancing all of these things come together to create a complex scenario of how people get infected. Until we know what is the most likely or most important ways we are transmitting to each other, we need to cover all the bases. Certainly, washing your hands and disinfecting surfaces, we have to do that until we know for certain that is something we need to continue doing. Host what kind of information have you seen on social media . Guest i try to stay off of that stuff as much as possible. Hos