Outbreak, we wanted to get you information about changes happening at the department impacting Service Members. I want to start with the latest numbers. Today there have been 30 seven reported cases, 18 military, 13 dependents, three civilian, and three contractors. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will provide updates each day as we receive them. Friday, deputy secretary norquist released Additional Guidance on travel. Effective today through may 11, all Domestic Travel for military personnel will be halted unless it meets one of a number of waiver criterias including Mission Central travel or humanitarian reasons. This will also restrict dod civilian hiring on dod installations to people within the immediate area of the facility. The secretary continues to state his top priority is to protect Service Members and family and maintain our ability to complete central missions. We are going to take all those efforts. I want to give a couple additional updates. Hasy, the Department Given authority to commissary store directors to impose restrictions on high demand products. This will be done in coordination with base leadership. The department is working to make sure Service Members and their families understand these changes and have access to the goods they need. Somely, i want to give you updates on what we are doing in the building. Starting today the secretary and the deputy secretary remain physically separated. We are attempting to put for lack of a better term a bubble around the two of them. That means they and their staffs will only interact via phone conference. We are screening people entering the secretary sweet and limiting the number of people who have access as well. Teamer today, the cmo hosted a Teletown Hall to address the protective measures we put in place. They got a bunch of good questions from people on the reservation which include this building as well as 70 eight other buildings in the National Capital region talking about force Protection Health protection measures. We are going to continue to do events like that here and around the country to keep people informed. I want to just think a number of people who worked on this problem for many weeks now. I believe we have had teams, a number of different bases, working on coronavirus issues, providing hhs support, at miramar, lachlan, and travis. Those teams have done an expounding outstanding job in a very demanding situation. They have continued to do a great job and everyone here at the department appreciates that. Last, i want to think the custodial staff at the pentagon. They have been asked over the past few weeks to really step up what they have done to help limit the spread of any Infectious Disease here. , theyk as you have seen are increasing their rounds, increasing the type of work they are doing, and that is to everybodys benefit here. I would say let us go straight to questions here. What the National Guard is doing in many states, is the Defense Department considering making available to civilian agencies medical facilities, medical equipment, medical personnel . I think you are all familiar with how the requests come into the department. So far we have received requests from hhs specific to the quarantining and housing of individuals who are either evacuated from wuhan, hubei province, or the grand princess and the diamond princess. 11 feederly, for the airports for individuals who flew back into the u. S. And need to be quarantined. We have not received any other ones at this time that we have responded to. We are looking at a number of different options with regard to resources and what we can do. I would point out the big benefit of the department of defense is logistics and planning support. Those are two things we are able to provide assistance to. There are other things where we will take a look as they come in, but at this time those are the only ones we have seen so far. Aside from the request itself, are you considering what you might be able to do in the area of medical assistance . We have done a look at abilities and resources and what we can do, and where we think we have capability to assist the civilian sector in the whole of government approach while still ensuring we have the resources necessary to take care of our personnel and their families and to focus on our central mission, strategic missions. We have done that analysis and are continuing to do it and will be providing that. If the secretary has that and can provide it as requests come in. Shelf,ave plans on the so have we looked at it . Absolutely. We do it every year routinely preparing for a variety of natural disasters. We do have plans looking at the capabilities we have. If we are asked to provide them or tasked to say what is possible, we can look at those plans. Plans cover natural disasters from the departments perspective, what we do is we look at what capabilities we best meetow they the requirements. If we are asked to do something, we look at what we have available and how to support that. Haveis is the closest i been standing next to somebody in about a week so it is throwing me off. There are obviously not doctors waiting around to go to work. They will be coming from civilian hospitals. How much can you actually support if you are asked . Those are great questions. Nowre going through right to identify what we can do. I want to emphasize the point that people have come up and said, what about this idea . What about that idea . We are trying to step through each of those questions we receive and say, here is possible here is what is possible. If we do this, here is the consequence. Why dont we mobilize the guard and the reserve . I think that is what youre talking about right now. The challenge is if you mobilize reserve medical personnel from their civilian jobs, they are no longer in their civilian jobs. That impacts the community where they worked. That is the tradeoff. Whether it is a natural disaster, coronavirus or anything else, that is part of the tradeoff we look at as we offer options going forward. Give us some idea of the capacity that is out there within the department of defense. How many hospital beds . How many doctors . If it comes to that. We have 36 hospitals in the United States. From the standpoint of a domestic response, 36 hospitals within the United States. As many of you are aware, they are relatively small hospitals. They are not 1000 bed hospitals. They range in size. Many of them are configured to support our immediate military needs. They take care of the activeduty population and their families and some retirees. We have some large facilities like here in the d. C. Area, walter reed, that have more diverse services. We have Smaller Services in remote facilities like Fort Wainwright in alaska. It has a small hospital that offers basic Community Hospital services. Unfortunately, the answer is it depends on the community and what the requirement was to support the Operational Force in the community that has determined the size of the hospitals that we have. Publicly ask for the corps of engineers to construct facilities. What could the corps of engineers realistically do . Im not going to be able to answer that question for the corps of engineers. The first question, some of those hospitals we do have, the way they are configured, a lot of neonatal, pediatric care beds in those hospitals. Our doctors are unsurprisingly highly trained in traumatic injuries and dealing with traumatic injuries. We have a much younger population we are dealing with treating in our hospitals. All of these factor into what is that capability we have for a potential outbreak that generally has been more devastating to Older Persons who different types of attention. That is being looked at as how we take the services we provide or the skills we have and see what we can do. With regard to the question about the governors comment, we have not received an rfa or request to do any construction. That would be something we would look at. At this time i think there are other options out there that we have seen private companies are able to do constructions. Facilities, but we have not been asked to look at that yet. Atare standing by to look them as they come in and work with the white house to best support those. Forward Vice President joe biden floated the idea of building these tend hospitals with 500 beds. Is that one of the options being considered right now . We do have tent hospitals. They are deployable. The challenge is they are designed to take care of trauma patients and combat casualties. We have a variety of capabilities, much like our fixed facility hospitals, are deployable hospitals vary in size and the specific capabilities are tailored to whatever the mission is. We have supported humanitarian operations in the past. We have supported relief efforts during natural disasters. What we are trying to be careful at is not overpromising. We want to be factual about what we have. Our fixed facilities are designed to support what we have. They are not 1000 bed medical centers all over the United States. They are small Community Hospitals. Are deployable hospitals range in size and capabilities and are focused and designed to take care of those in combat. Them,are asked to deploy we have great colleagues and i am proud to serve with them. As mr. Hoffman said, they deliver excellent care if asked to do so. But the colleagues we have in uniform are focused on a specific military need that we have. To Service Members in afghanistan and iraq have enough tests . Im not aware of any lack of tests. I believe there has been concerned about the fact that the equipment to run the tests, the specific machine is not in afghanistan. Thats true. We have a relatively small footprint in afghanistan. We have now 13 labs up and running with that machine around the world. The closest one to afghanistan is a military lab, our lab in germany. Thee are other nations in middle east that have the specific type of equipment. What we do with any lab we cannot perform in a deployed environment is we fly or ship it to the nearest lab that can perform it. That does not mean they are not getting tested. We are just not running the test itself in afghanistan. To be clear, i had this conversation with general mckenzie. I think centcom has put out a statement. We are not a well of any aware of any individual in afghanistan that has indicated an inability to test. We are confident they are able to get tested in country. The test results are reported back to the individual. On the first question, just to point out, talking about tents and tent hospitals, one limiting factor being personnel. Even if we were able to build tents for hospitals, we still need doctors, the nurses, equipment and all that in there. As the general mentioned, those individuals from our system would come from existing hospitals. As you heard, general abrams discussed on thursday how he called up those doctors who were assigned to him, but were not yet deployed. He called those doctors. They went to help in u. S. Forces korea. In many cases they came from a domestic military facilities. That is what would happen with the hospital like that. The other thing i would ask is you look at this and the framework of civilian society and how many beds in hospitals are available on the civilian side versus we have surge capacity. We have capability. That number is when you look at what dod can do, compared to what is existing, i dont know if you have the percentage, but it was two or 3 of the hospital beds are dod beds. Barbara . A couple of followups. What is the latest information the threatout what volume is that you are planning against . What does the data tell you about how Many Americans including military might need hospitalization . Also, can you tell us how many ventilators are in military inventory and also, my other quick question, you mentioned i think the secretary and the deputy are no longer within eyeball range of each other. What is your recommendation to the chairman, the vice chairman, the nuclear forces, special ops, the short string forces that cannot afford to be fullstrength . We could spend the next hour going through the details. I will see if i can give an abbreviated response. From a data standpoint, now that we are getting accurate data from italy and from korea and from the United States, i think we are getting a clearer picture. Cdc is doing an excellent job updating that data so we understand how widespread this is. And your organizations have reported, this disease is easily transmitted. Ourof the big concerns on part is not so much the active duty force contracting the illness because it does not appear to make most younger people that sick. It is the active duty force contracting the ailments and spreading it to someone else. Of those who contracted, how do we minimize the risk of them spreading it to others and also, how do we ensure that we are prepared to take care of our own beneficiaries or if asked, take care of other patients as part of a whole of government response . How Many Americans . How Many Americans do i think well get infected . I think the cdc the scenarios you are planning. You must have an idea what you are planning against. We are going to leave Predictive Modeling to the cdc. We are going to speak with one voice from the government. Ventilators, can you talk about in the building, my recommendation has been, as i shared with you all during my last sessions, that people practice social distancing and where they can avoid getting within six feet of each other, that they do so. I have provided that advice for the last couple of weeks, the same advice the cdc has been providing. We put that out to everybody, that we want to practice social distancing because that is one of the very effective ways to minimize the spread and protect each other from getting sick. That is not unique to Senior Leaders. As far as the special forces or other units, the operational advice we have given to the services across, to look at those missions and identify the risk balance between medical risk and operational requirements, different units have come up with Different Solutions to that, to mitigate the risk while preserving mission capabilities. It is not a onesizefitsall. Specifics on what that units mission is and how best to support it going forward. As we have looked at the plans, they are all solid plans, at least the ones i have seen. They involve everything from shiftwork and having certain people Work Together for two weeks at a certain location, work from home, trading teams in and out, much as commercial companies are doing so you dont have everybody in one place at one time, common sense things to minimize the risk that an entire unit might be impacted at one time if someone gets sick. We are looking to have briefings this week. Dont hold me to it, but we are attempting to have a commander connect with you tomorrow. He will be able to get into some of these questions. Right now they are numbers we are not prepared to give out. The number deals with our deployable medical capability, which is a number we are not prepared to give out. We can get back to you on that and will work you through it. Im going to try something tricky. Im going to try to go with somebody on the line. Matthew cox from military. Com. Thank you, mr. Hoffman. Can you hear me ok . Yes. Could you provide an update on how the recent travel restrictions are affecting shipping dates for basic training, boot camp, as well as any deployment delays, cancellation updates . Instances, ic would refer you to the services. Has even ae given lot of flexibility to commanders to make waivers. The way the guidance was given with the ability of individuals to issue based on necessity. The commanders have that ability to determine that if a certain deployment or a certain rotation or a certain training, they have the ability to move forward with that if it is Mission Central. We are looking to move forward with Training Programs given the size of those programs and the impact a major delay on training could have. We are looking at that and may have updates in the near future, but for the most part, we believe the commanders at the fourstar level down to the one star level have the authority to minimize any disruption to their forces. And that any individual in that pipeline is looking for guidance on what to do, we have given instruction, tried to be as transparent and thorough as possible instructing them to reach out to their supervisor to get guidance. As a quick followup, is there any update on defender europe . I know deployments were halted the past couple days, there are 6000 on the ground right now, but there were supposed to be 20,000. Any updates as far as more troops who are going to be sent or not . I do not have any update. To eucom. Rect you they did indicate there was likely no Additional Forces that would be flowed forward to that. To that command or to that exercise. I do not have an update on the numbers of it. Although the main exercise may be somewhat constrained, look at individual pieces of that exercise and continue to get as much benefit as possible. If the guard is activated and a guardsman is a doctor fulltime in a local hospital, what will be the policy decision . Will that member of the military still be called up and taken away from that civilian hospital or would they be left . That is one of the calculations that have to be made in making a decision to do that. I have been wearing this uniform for 37 years, i have done whatever the country asked me to do. Anyone wearing this uniform would say the same thing. Has those decisions are made, Senior Leaders are going to balance, if we take someone from here and send them there, what is the impact .