We take you live now to a discussion on the coronavirus pandemic with doctor anthony fauci, director of the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institute of health and a White House Coronavirus task force member, this is live coverage on cspan2. The pandemic of historical portions, i think we cant deny the fact that something when history looks back will be comparable to what we saw in mid 1918. The situation that is the current challenge that we are facing right now is a resurgence of infections in the south and southwestern part of the country with particularly in areas like california, florida, arizona and texas. You are seeing record numbers of cases, mostly interesting among young individuals strongly suggesting the link between attempting to open in many respects of pictures and photos and films of will get back to this in a moment of responsibility where individuals, mostly young people were seen at bars congregated and clouded places, many without masks which really adds fuel to the fire in our challenge today and tomorrow and next week is trying to contain the outbreaks and get us back on the track of being able to not only contain but to also open safely. So bottom line, if the global serious situation is a serious situation in the United States, the United States being a large country and very heterogeneous on demographically in other ways is a mixed bag, some areas of the country are doing well and others are being challenged as it states just mentioned. You said to come. I will do it briefly, right now if you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic anywhere from 50 7500000000 people get died, that was the mother of all pandemics in truly historic. I hope we do not approach that with this. But it does have the makings of a possibility of approaching that in seriousness. I hope the kinds of interventions that are going to be in implementing will not allow that to happen. But it does have strong similarities with that and it was the emergence of a brandnew infection, that was influenza, this is coronavirus. That essentially crushed itself onto the human population and had two characteristics in assessing that makes it the perfect storm and that is a virus that jump species but almost immediately has an extraordinarily capable and efficient way of spreading from human to human, simultaneously with having a considerable degree of mortality. That is what were facing now, you asked me too compare with other outbreaks and i think if i give you examples of each of those, i will do it very quickly, one or the other of those characteristics but not both. Thats what i refer to when i say the perfect storm. Lets take the threat of the bird flu that you and i had a lot of experience in the department. That is the h5n1 in the age seven and nine, jumped from a chicken to a human that had prepended a potential but what it did not do it did not spread from human to human so if you were unlucky enough to get infected you had a 35, 37, 38 mortality but it did not get in mostly from human, did not go from human to human. But then you had the situation with 2009 h1n1 which was very efficiently transmitted from human to human but pathogenic we it was a week virus, the death that year was less than the seasonal flu. So you had the two ends of the spectrum, one transmitted well and did not kill and one killed but did not transmit well, but what we have now is a virus that is very capable of spreading from human to human and even though it has a wide range of impact from 20 40 of the people have most symptoms to individual who get moderately sick, very sick seriously enough to go to hospital and for intensive care, ventilation and even death, its a very unusual virus and at the range of severity of so great and wide which actually leads to confusion on the part of people as to whether this is really serious that some people say it is. It is not serious to some people but it is deadly serious to others. I will stop there and thats the overview. That is incredibly helpful in my followup, because i think the virus has a desperate impact as you describe, theres issues and they be really helpful if you could help clear up. There is a discussion of a wise and total u. S. Cases and testing alone as opposed to the disease progressing. Two, should we take comfort the death rates are declining which they are even as infection rates increase in the most recent discussion about the ability of the virus to spread to hear salons versus those issues have been coming up frequently and if you could help us understand what the science shows us. Okay, first i want to write down your question. So the first question, is this just an increase because of testing versant increase. There is no doubt that it is both. The more you test the more you will pickup, the increase in testing, there is no doubt there is more infections. We know that because the percentage of cases that are tested positive is increasing. Therefore unequivocally, your scene truly more new cases and in addition we are seeing now more hospitalization which lagged behind infections and we will see in very likely more death and there are more infections and should we take comfort that is separate. We have to be careful, the big spike in the death rate that we saw was a terrible situation that they went through in new york city metropolitan area in situations like chicago and new orleans in detroit, that death rate happily is going way way down the what will happen we will likely see more deaths as people get hospitalized but i doubt it will go up to the extent that we have seen before, mostly for a couple of reasons. One, if you look at the age range of the individuals who are getting infected now as opposed to early on a few months ago, its about a decade to a decade and a half younger, even if young people, which some do get sick enough to get hospitalized, it is highly unlikely that the death rate among them are going to be at the level of the death rate that we saw in the real core of the explosion in the northeastern part of the country. The last question in the debate and to the extent of the virus transmitted through aerosol. That is still debatable. In fact the minutes before i came in i read a summary analysis of it, it is almost certainly there is a degree of aerosol occurrence, the degree of transmission aerosol wise is unclear, most people think it is not the dominance transmission but the definitive proof i dont think its dominant, i think it actually occurs. For those listening to know the difference, the droplet transmission really goes beyond 6 feet. If you cough, sneeze or talk, drop which is the reason for the 6 feet limit about staying away, when young aerosol, its in the droplet less than 5 micrometers, the capability of floating around and you expect that it has the capability not only temporarily but getting the hind enter behind the masks were in the masks. Thats what they talk about with aerosol. That is very helpful. I will turn this over to mo for the next question. Taking dr. Fauci for joining us today. Lets turn to the respondent now. We really talked about the disease hitting the United States harder than any other nation around the world. You talked about is not entirely just because testing. With a certain big picture, how much of that some of the nations i have dealt with this make it more effectively had more of a coordinated National Response where we have opted for more of a statebased or local and Regional Response for the United States. Is that part of the disparity, can we even have a needed National Response . It is always easy to look back and say if we had done this, wouldve given different. That will happen when this is over and people are analyzing it every which way. Some of the things that i believe have an impact on the differences, i dont think we can fully explain it, and europe for example and in some of the asian countries, when they shut down essentially locked down, they lock down to about 90 plus percent. They really locked down. We have a very large and heterogeneous country with different risks in different places geographically and demographically and in reality even though we locked down considerably, we only locked on the estimate is somewhere around 50 55 or so. When we have the outbreak and in europe they went up, they peaked in came right back down to baseline, they really did go down from thousands of infections to handfuls or so of infections. In the United States if you look at our curve from better or worse, we went up, we peaked in we came down and we never really came all the way back down to baseline, we stayed around 20000 a day of new cases until the most recent surge where we went to 30, 40, 50 and then 60. So the issue is, we never got down to the baseline so when you started to open up, you have relatively few amount of infections to deal with where as when we opened up now, you are seeing the search. The reason for that is complicated, there are many, the issue of how one responds, we live in a country from its founding had a federalist bend that had independent right incapability of doing things their own way and in many respects that works to our advantage in a situation. Possibly that really was a little bit of a disadvantage. Very difficult to make a definitive comment about the contribution that that paid for the difference between what we see here and what we see in europe. We will talk to john, we have so many questions we will get to john and mine as quickly as possible before we go to the students. With students, you can still submit your questions using the q a tab at the bottom of the screen. Speaking of the schools in the students, many schools around the country are announcing their guidance and we have at georgetown. Just yesterday the l. A. County and San Diego CountyPublic Schools announced they would be online for the fall. The president and others have talked about reopening schools and reopening as quickly as possible, the cdc issued guidance describing steps that schools can open safely. I guess what i would love for you to do is step back and help us think about how should schools approach the upcoming academic and if you can clarify what we know about the risks that children, teenagers and young adults across their whole age cycle through k12 and higher. And what it presents among itself and with teachers and staff in their family. Whats the right way to think about this going forward. For clarity lets talk about elementary, middle, high school and not universities. There are major differences there. We can get into universities later. I think people are much more focused on schools. I started with a general principle and then work your way towards operational aspects and exceptions. As a general principle, we should try as best as possible to keep the children in schools for the reasons that the unintended downstream Ripple Effect consequences of keeping the kids out of school and the impact of working families and other aspects of society can be profound, not to mention the negative affect on the children. As a principal, we should try as a default to get the kids to stay in school. However, that will very from where you are in the country and with the dynamics of the outbreak are in your particular region. That is the reason why although the fundamental principle is there the one other guiding principle that is overriding is the safety and the welfare of the children in the safety and the welfare of the teachers. You have to keep that into consideration. If youre the part of a country where the dynamics of the outbreak are really minimal if at all and theres no problem at all in getting back in if youre in a situation where youre in outbreak mode, you leave it up to the local individuals as you said in certain california schools, certain florida schools, making a decision based on the judgment of making sure the safety of the children and safety of the teachers are paramount. So you guide the principal, but tried to get them open to the extent that we can but lets take a look at the dynamics of the infection of the area. Thank you tony. This maybe is a little bit more from the response of the government and the response from citizens. I am glad youre here in speaking out. And im glad youre giving students a chance to talk with you. A lot of people are confused right now about the state of the pandemic and what they should be doing. My wife and i every night sit down and what were allowed to do with the kids and comparing new stories and different pieces of guidance. I think a lot of the confusion can be contributed to three main issues. One, the evolving nature of the pandemic has resulted in more information and new information involving guidance. Too, a growing body of deliberate misinformation and disinformation being spread, much online. And three, the polarization and growing politicized nation of the discussion of the pandemic. Even this past week in the white house pointing to your previous comments order to question the guidance, and given all the ba back, misinformation, disinformation, involving guidance, increase politics in the conversation, how do people synthesize all the information in order to make the right decision. How do they know who to trust. Thats a good question, it is difficult to give you a definitive answer. For the most part, i believe, you can trust medical authorities. I believe i think you can trust me but i would stick with respected medical authorities who have a track record of telling the truth and who have a track record of giving information and policy and recommendation based on Scientific Evidence and good data. So if i were to give advice to you and your family and your friends and your family i would say thats the safest bet to do, to listen to the recommendations from that category of people but its entirely understandable how the public can get mixed messages and get a bit confused about what they should do. Let me ask one followup before tossing it back to john. You just mentioned data, there was a story that broke moments before we can be here today about bypassing the Data Collection of the cdc and going straight to hhs. Im wondering if you had any thoughts on the latebreaking news. One bad idea about commenting on latebreaking news that you did not read. Thats a way to shoot yourself in the foot. I think it will pass on that one. Fair enough. We will go to john and after that we will go to questions which will be better than john or my questions. Absolutely. I think my last question as we queue up, its really we asked a lot of questions and so far it gets to the complexity of this experience the country is going through. Most of the people on the webinar are students and their young adults and as we start to bring people on, i would love to ask you, given what we know now and everything that we have talked about, what is your message to young people, young adults, teenagers, as more states open up summer pausing and what are the risks and the responsibilities of young people as we approach the pin to make given what we know. Thank you for that question. I was hoping someone would ask it. I think it is key to what is going on right now with the resurgence that we are seeing in some of the southern states. I say this with trepidation because i dont want to seem preaching about it. But since right now if you look at whats going on in the country, the infections are among young people, very likely contributed at least in part to what youre seeing on tv of young people gathering at bars, crowded places, congregating, many without masks. There is an understandable situation where a young person could say you know statistical statistically, the chances of me getting into trouble of getting affected are much smaller than an elderly person with an underlying condition and since i as a young person and quite healthy, it does not matter to me, i would rather be there sipping my margarita at a bargain a crown, to me thats understandable, im not blaming the innocent. However, what they need to understand is that given the nature of this outbreak, even if you get infected and have no symptoms at all and never get sick, you are inadvertently propagating the pandemic, you are part of the problem and not the solution. By propagating the pandemic, it may not matter to you because you probably will not get any symptoms but the chances are you will infect someone who then will infect someone who then could get sick, could get hospitalized, could even die. Not only are you propagating the outbreak but you are actually putting other people in danger. I would hope you could appeal to the young people to not only take the individual personal responsibility but think about your societal responsibility. Thats what i mean when i say we are all in this together. Everybody has a place in the role in getting this outbreak under control and you are not caring whether you get infected or not is not a good way to get the outbreak under control. To get it under control means you dont let yourself get infected and you dont spread to anybody else. Again i say there was some trepidation. Im not blaming anyone and i think people do this innocently, they dont mean to be part of the problem. But inadvertently they are part of the problem. That is the message we have to get across. Thank you tony. Thank you very much. Maybe i will turn this back to mow so we can bring on student questions. We have a lot of questions so dr. Fauci we will try to get through them and as many of them as we can. Our staff will notify students when we are ready and getting close to being ready to call on you, when we do make sure your broadcast ready because you will be on screen asking doctor gott to your question directly. When we call you introduce yourself, tell us who you are, where youre zooming in from, your field of study so dr. Fauci will know. With our first question comes from marcia. Marcia introduced herself. Hi dr. Fauci, thank you for speaking with us today. My name is marsha and im a senior majoring in International Political economy. I am currently zooming in from texas. Im in a covert hotspot at the moment. I guess my question has to do with what young people can do to contribute to depoliticize in this pandemic. I feel like a lot of the pandemic has been controlled or impacted by politics. Im wondering what young people can do about making a more about science than politics. Obviously that appears to be a simple question but its a complicated situation that you are asking about. It is very tough for young people to have an impact on depoliticize asian except by not being talked about. It is a pandemic. Keep reminding yourself and your peers that this is something in which it does not matter who you are, what you are, y