Morning. This morning, author of epidemic ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next outbreak. Also a National Reporter with the hill. Ebola and the global scramble to prevent the next killer outbreak, what was the scramble like . Guest the scramble has been going on for a couple decades. In the wake of the Ebola Outbreak in west africa that infected more than 128,000 people and killed more than 11,000, the world has undergone a change and they are understanding how pandemics have the potential to spread. We live in a different world than we did back in 1918 when the spanish flu struck or even the end of the 1960s when there were significant flu outbreaks. We are a globalized world. We travel all over the place. Americans travel to every continent in the world and people in every continent travel here. That sort of interconnectedness means something pops up in a wet a planen china is only flight away from the United States. Something that a reps in the jungles of south america is only a short way away from the United States. The american cdc funded a bunch cdcs in 49 countries around the world aiming to increase what they call surveillance, monitoring to make sure they are able to see when one of these novel viruses comes up and begins to spread. Ended inrt basically most of those countries last year and that is a key part of this timeline. We dont know exactly when this coronavirus began to circulate in china. The first case they had that scientists have identified goes back to november 17, about a month and a half before the World Health Organization spotted a cluster in wuhan, china. Mightpossible this virus have been circulating long before that. Done is thisd has sort of Surveillance Network to monitor for these diseases. We are not always funding it at the level it needs because as we have seen in the past and as we it this virus is controllable if it is spotted early, if the people who have it are contact traced and isolated and if authorities get their hands on the situation early before this becomes a mega outbreak. Thiss all but certain virus was in the United States at least three weeks before the first positive case. If we had the testing capability and the ability to find that virus, we might not be in the we certainly wouldnt be in the position we are in today. Host from your reporting, what happened with testing and the cdc . Guest it is not just the cdc that is involved. What the cdc does in a novel case like this, when they have a new virus is they will develop a diagnostic test quickly, and then it is up to the fda to bring that task to the private industries and the private industries that build their own the cbc test basically seeds the test laboratories. Precedento historical for the cdc building a test that then scales to the scope and size we need to control a virus and monitor it across the world. The disconnect here appears to be somewhere between the fda and the commercial companies that didnt race to fill that void and create these diagnostic tests that could be used by private laboratories across the country. That is going to be a big part of the investigating of how this went so wrong. Host do we know why these private companies did not race to fill that void as you said . Guest not yet. It is something of a mystery. Typically in the past it has fallen to senior officials of the fda and the department of health and Human Services to gather those companies together and light a fire under them and say it is time to ramp up building the testing capacity. Now we havee tons of diagnostic tests. The fda has factory fasttrack a number of them. Cdc made thise test that turned out to be corrupted. There were three elements and wasntthe elements properly working. There were a lot of false negatives and false positives. Basically the cdc testing didnt work but there was no back end fill from the private industry until the fda gave the emergency use authorization in late february. Basically we lost this month of time when we should have been testing as many people as possible so we could have found the virus when it was contained in tiny clusters as opposed to when it was turning to overwhelm our hospitals. Host we want to invite our viewers to join in on this conversation. Lessons learned from the Ebola Outbreak to the coronavirus pandemic we are seeing now. If you live in the eastern or central part of the country, 202 7488000. Mountain and pacific, 202 7488001. Reid wilson is our guest this morning. What was the response to the Ebola Outbreak . What were the Lessons Learned from it . Guest the response was overwhelming. This is an outbreak to hit three of the most impoverished countries in the world, liberia, sierra leone and guinea. The Life Expectancy in those countries is 25 years less than the u. S. And 30 years less than the most advanced countries in the world. The response was global, immediate and overwhelming. States sent 3000 troops to liberia which is not something we have ever done before in response to a virus. They deployed more than 1400 people from the cdc which had never happened before. The cdc wasnt that sort of organization. The french deployed to guinea. We saw this overwhelming response. I should not minimize this at all. We saw People Racing back to the countries and staying in their countries at times when they could have left to save their own people. The real heroes for the people who were walking towards the fire in their own countries to try and save them. A lot of them did not survive the virus. The lessons we learned were pretty monumental. To democratize information which is something we need to see more of. People are smart and if they are told how to protect themselves, they will take the steps, in some cases violating their own thousands of years of cultural tradition in the case of say, burying or washing a body after death. In the case of the ebola virus, that is how people that is how most cases were spreading, people washing the bodies in preparation for the burial. When Public Health officials in liberia told people to stop doing that and allow safe burial teams to handle dead bodies, that saved thousands of lives and it goes to show that if competent and reasonable information is presented in a calm and logical way, the public will understand and take the steps necessary to protect themselves and kill the virus. Host we will go to calls. Sergio in florida. Good morning to you. Your question or comment . Caller good morning. Good morning to you all, how are you . Host doing well. What is your question or comment . Caller how are you today reid . Guest im doing fine today. What have you got . Caller a couple questions. How do we learn from it and if ebola is more effective than the corona. And ebola coronavirus virus are from different families. The difference is a coronavirus is very easy to contract to contract very easy to contract but it is very less deadly. The mortality rate is somewhere between half a percent and 1 . The ebola virus by contrast if untreated, the mortality rate can be 80 or 90 . Coronavirus is easy to contract but will public not kill you. The ebola virus is very difficult to contract. You actually have to touch blood or bodily fluids of someone who has it but it is highly deadly if you do get infected. The prospects for a vaccine are interesting and i think this is thatt of the communication Public Health officials are struggling to convey. Are eight to 18 months away from a vaccine, which is probably what the more optimistic estimates are, it would be the fastest element of any vaccine in human history, the fast the fastest vaccine previously developed was for the moms over the course of about four years in the 1950s. The good news is we are significantly more advanced than we were in the 1950s but vaccines are not like treatment. They have a new bar they have to clear in order to get approved and become effective. For a treatment, you are treating something and somebody who already has the virus. You are not introducing them to anything new, any new threat. For a vaccine, you are introducing something new into somebodys body. That can be pretty dangerous. An improperly designed vaccine can do more harm than good, which means there are several more layers of testing a vaccine has to go through and of the 100 plus vaccines that are in design and develop it right now, the fast majority of them are going the majority of them are going to fail. When it shots on goal comes to the vaccine, and it would be great if we could have 10 or 15 different vaccines that work but they are all going to have different efficacy rates. There are vaccines will for things like the flu that only cover a third to half of us who get the vaccine in the first place. All of these things are going to have different efficacy rates. They will be available at different times and once they are approved, they then have to be developed. Just because you approve a vaccine does not mean you automatically created 7 million doses 7 billion doses we are going to need around the world. We are a ways away from a vaccine. If one thing is not being communicated effectively to the American People or to people around the world its the fact that we are not going to have a vaccine tomorrow or next week or next month or even by the end of the year and even if we did, it will still take a substantial a lot of time to develop and this tribute and basically get it and distribute and basically get it to all of us and into all of our Doctors Offices. We also have to hope the people he actually that people actually take it. It is a huge puzzle with a lot of different challenges and one we have to be realistic about. Host rosemary is next in west virginia. Caller hi. Host good morning. Go ahead. Welcome to the conversation. Caller my concern is that people are panicking. I am a dialysis patient. I have to go out. I have to survive. Nobody wants no one to die, but that is life. That is a part of life. People are dying from different things. And they told me to take a flu shot in 90 in 1996. I got the flu after i took the shot. I havent taken a flu shot since then. You cannot blame from for everything. The swinecame out fluke, ebola, all of these things come and they go. Some people survive, some dont. Children are dying, grown folks are dying. Everything from one thing or another. Host reid wilson, this is a comet that has come up throughout the show a comment that has come up throughout the show. Can you explain heard immunity . Guest herd immunity is a troubling concept, imagine a population of 100 people. If a new virus is introduced, 100 of those 100 people are susceptible to getting it. Once 20 of them get it and recover, that only 80 of those 100 people are susceptible to get it. Eventually the population of those who are susceptible become small enough that they wont come in to contact. The odds of one person coming into contact with somebody who has the virus who is susceptible shrinks until eventually the virus has nowhere else to go. Viruse like a fire in the has burned up all the wood. When there is no more wood to burn, the virus eventually burns out. Immunitypt of herd comes from herds of sheep and cattle. We are not sheep and cattle. The value of a life is substantially different as you can imagine. Thing that she brought up is this notion of dialysis and people having to go out. One troubling thing about this virus is that people are suddenly afraid to seek care. Not may be ok if you are going to your Doctors Office to check out your flu and you are recovering at home, but it is not ok when you may be suffering from a cardiac problem or a stroke. I was talking to an er doctor in new york. He said in the early days of this, he didnt understand where all the heart attacks had gone. It was as if people stopped having heart attacks and were only having coronavirus. Of course that is not the case. People are having these cardiac problems and they are afraid to go to the hospital. One thing we saw in west africa the more people former director of the cdc likes to say more people died because of the ebola virus than from the ebola virus. What that means is more people died from things like malaria or cholera or some of these common diseases people know how to treat but they werent seeking treatment because they were afraid to go to a hospital setting because they were worried that ebola was present. We may be seeing a significant amount of excess deaths coming from things like Heart Disease and hypertension, things that would be treatable if people sought treatment that they are not seeking treatment because of the coronavirus. That is a troubling thing, and it is why we are seeing a lot of rural communities, Hospital Systems having some real problems keeping their funding. Hospitals in boston are talking about losing 5 billion in lost Services Provided through the next couple of months. We had a caller talking about the henry ford clinic in detroit in the last hour, they just laid in the middle of a Public Health pandemic. Why are they doing that . Because nobody is seeking treatment for these other things. Nobody is having the elective surgeries that are the bread and butter of your typical Hospital Systems. There is a real risk that more people will die because of the coronavirus than from the coronavirus. Wouldntially more people die than would have otherwise because they are not seeking treatment for the stuff they need to seek treatment for. Host we will go to texas, lloyd. Caller good morning. I would say i agree with a lot but whateid was saying is really scary is all the miss all of the misinformation. Ask one of the callers where did she read something and she just talking to a point where she done she did not even address where she got her information. There is so much gross misinformation and people are just running rampant with the fact that this information is coming through social media, coming through wordofmouth but there is no fact of where the stuff is coming from and the information that is actually true and valid is not being recognized because of the abundance of misinformation being spewed. Host reid wilson, your thoughts on that . Guest that is a good point and something that Public Health officials know about and have been paying a lot of attention to. A very smart woman at the World Health Organization calls this the infodemic, it happens every time there is an epidemic. Mids misinformation gets out there as broadly as possible and in some cases it can be damaging but not deadly. Ebody seeking treatment seeking the wrong kind of medicine or Something Like that. Somebody here is that essential oils can solve something when they cant or Something Like that. In other cases, it can be massively destructive to the response, to Health Care Workers and things like that. Is an Ebola Outbreak that is winding down in the democratic republic of congo. They are beset by Ethnic Violence and have been for decades. Saw which was like six months ago, there have been 200 attacks on Health Care Workers and Health Facilities because there were rumors that they are bringing the ebola virus to congo. People have died because of these fake rumors. Example ofextreme this, but we have also seen the World Health Organization said last week they have seen more than 30 attacks in 11 countries around the world on Health Care Facilities and there have been dozens of attacks in the United States on asian andicans and hasidic choose hasidic jews and minorities being blamed for a virus that had nothing to do with their ethnicity. Misinformation can go from a minor annoyance to a lifethreatening disaster in just a short time. Has no agenda. It just is. Meanwhile a lie does have an agenda and can have a political advantage over truth. That is a scary thought. We need to be paying attention to the actual experts who are talking about what we know about the virus. Fauci orke Anthony Robert redfield in his top two lieutenants. And his top two lieutenants. Thing that i find fascinating about this. We are learning about this coronavirus at an unprecedented clip, faster than we have ever learned about any pathogen or virus in world history. As an example, in 2009 the new england journal of medicine published 54 articles on h1n1 that might have been a pandemic. It turned out not to be as bad as people feared but it could have been. April, the middle of new england journal of medicine had already published 64 items on the coronavirus. They published dozens more in the weeks since. Basically we are learning a ton about this virus. We are also learning how much we dont know. We started off by diagnosing people with a fever, a cough, fatigue. Cause know this virus can things that look like heart attacks and things that look like strokes or actual strokes. Pinkeye is a potential symptom as well. As if this it is virus is sitting at the intersection of every single one of our internal systems and just decides which one to attack at any given person. Foran be totally different two people who might otherwise be equally susceptible or equally resilient. Virus learning about this but it remains a complete mystery in a lot of respects. Host jackie in ohio, good morning. Caller good morning. Host go ahead with your comment or question. Is at thinkomment we should go back to work. Assistant and i make more on unemployment and i still believe the economy needs to go back to work. My big thing is i am sitting here and these people are whining about how the government is responsible for them. We were only off work for a month. Me youalways taught should be able to take care of yourself for at least three months. Say some buddy broke their arm or got sick, anything could happen. You could lose your job. You should be able to take care of yourself for a good three mo