world and some countries are
taking drastic steps to try
to stop its path.
The Italian government tonight put
the entire country on lockdown.
The central bank has devised a
plan to deep clean China's cash.
Governments across the world wrestling now
with just how far they need
to go to stop its spread.
While the scope and scale of
the virus here in the U.S.
continues to grow, the U.S.
federal government is facing the
challenge of containing a widespread
outbreak. The burden for getting us
prepared for protecting us falls
on the federal government. That's
why we have it.
The World Health Organization has
reported more than 160 thousand
cases of the novel Coronavirus
responsible for the disease called
COVID-19 globally as of March 16th.
If you look at the curves of
outbreaks, you know, they go big peaks
and they come down. What we need
to do is flatten that down.
The impact of the Coronavirus is
rippling through the global economy
and world stock markets, prompting
policymakers like the Federal
Reserve to enact emergency measures
not seen since the financial
crisis. We saw a risk to the to
the outlook for the economy and chose
to act. In China more than 80000
cases of the virus have been
reported since mid-January.
The Chinese government put measures
in place like mandatory regional
quarantines for tens of millions of people
to try to stop it from
spreading further. The U.S.
government has declared a national
emergency and imposed mandatory
quarantines for the first time in
decades as more than 4000 people
have been exposed to the virus.
We haven't had a real federally
sponsored quarantine in more than 50
years and we are
in unprecedented territory.
So what can the U.S. government
do to contain an outbreak?
And what lessons has it
learned from past pandemics?
Some experts have compared the Corona
virus to the 1918 influenza
pandemic, also known as
a Spanish flu.
One reason for this is they
both have very high mortality rates.
During the 1918 influenza pandemic
mortality rates were around 2
percent. That means the disease killed
roughly 2 percent of all the
people who were infected.
By comparison, normal strains of the
flu today have a mortality rate
of around 0.1
percent. Early estimates from the
World Health Organization have
found the mortality rate of
COVID-19 is around 3.4
percent. This is not just the flu.
It's probably 10 times more
deadly than the flu.
These numbers have prompted some
to worry that the Coronavirus
pandemic could reach the scale
of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
The Spanish flu killed more
than 50 million people worldwide,
including six hundred seventy five
thousand in the U.S.,
making it the deadliest flu
in the past century.
In total, an estimated 500 million
people were infected with the
virus, one third of
the world's population.
The Spanish flu occurred in three waves
the spring of 1918, fall of
1918 and spring and winter of 1919.
And the U.S. government had
limited resources to fight it.
The country was suffering from a
shortage of doctors and nurses
following World War One, with an
estimated 30 percent of all U.S.
physicians engaged in
military service.
The federal government passed a $1
million budget in 1918, equal to
more than 16 million in today's
dollars to recruit medical doctors
and nurses. In 1918, there were no
lab tests that could detect the
virus and no vaccines to
help prevent the flu's infection.
So government officials relied
heavily on so-called
non-pharmaceutical interventions.
These included measures like isolation,
quarantine and limits on
public gatherings.
Policemen patrolled the streets wearing
masks, schools were closed
and public events were canceled.
Many of these non-pharmaceutical interventions
were instituted not at
the federal level, but by
state and local governments.
But despite some of these steps,
fear and panic spread across the
U.S.. Meanwhile, local officials weren't
always transparent about the
severity of the disease.
In Chicago, the mortality rate at
one hospital reached thirty nine
point eight percent in 1918.
Yet the city's public health
commissioner proclaimed worry kills more
people than the epidemic.
This lack of communication and
transparency created distrust and even
more panic and serves as an
important lesson for future outbreaks.
An analysis of the 1918 epidemic by
the Institute of Medicine put it
this way, in handling any crisis,
it's absolutely crucial to retain
credibility. Giving false assurances is the
worst thing one can do.
Advancements have made it much better
and probably will help us
prevent ever having something like
the 1918 pandemic flu happened
again in the world. But we still
have to take appropriate actions and
there are some commonsense
things people can do.
Today, the federal government has a chain
of systems in place in case
a pandemic hits.
Here's how that response should
unfold according to standard protocol.
The Department of Health and Human
Services, or HHS, leads the way
overseeing a web of other agencies,
including the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, the CDC, the
Food and Drug Administration FDA
and the National Institutes
of Health NIH.
HHs also manages the Strategic
National Stockpile, which is the
country's largest supply of pharmaceuticals,
masks and other medical
supplies. It's basically treated like,
you would think, a hurricane
response where FEMA leads.
But in this instance, HHS leads
and everyone else in the department
is there to support HHS in
responding to the public health and
medical needs of the country.
Typically, the first thing HHS would
do is declare a public health
emergency. This frees up some
public funding for health emergencies.
The department may also
issued guidelines on travel.
Experts call this
first phase containment.
HHS did this for the Coronavirus back
in January when it was picking
up steam in mainland China.
The Corona virus presents a public
health emergency in the United
States. Action one containment.
So you try to make sure anyone
who has a disease doesn't infect
anyone else and make sure you try to
keep the disease out of the U.S.
if that's possible. The next
phase is called mitigation.
That's where the CDC takes
center stage setting guidelines for
hospitals, schools and businesses
around the country.
The agency works with state and
local health departments by sending
out testing kits and explaining
procedures to identify patients who
are infected. In mid-March, the
CDC recommended individuals and
organizations should cancel events with 50
or more people because of
the Corona virus pandemic.
Congress could also authorize funding
to states for public health
emergencies. Ultimately, the state and
local folks are the frontline.
And they've gotten funding over
the years from the federal
government, more than 600 million dollars
a year to help prepare them
in the event that this
type of thing happens.
State and local officials must decide
whether to carry out the most
extreme step when it comes
to fighting an epidemic.
Imposing a quarantine.
The federal government has the
authority to impose quarantines as
part of the Constitution, but this
mainly extends to people entering
at U.S. borders or
traveling between states.
Ultimately, the decisions about things
like quarantines and school
closings, business closings, that's going to
be a state and local
decision, not a decision
made in Washington.
So we can look at recent epidemics
like smallpox, SARS or Ebola to get
a glimpse at the different
responses from the federal government
today. First, think of the smallpox
outbreak in the 1950s and 60s.
Warning these images showing the toll
of the disease are graphic.
It killed 300 million people
in the 20th century alone.
The last time the U.S.
government issued a federally sponsored
quarantine was to
help contain smallpox.
The quarantines were used as part of
a broader global effort to fight
the disease. Mass vaccination campaigns
were crucial to the fight,
and ultimately the World
Health Organization declared smallpox
eradicated in 1980.
We did it with
smallpox through vaccines.
We just covered, blanketed the world
with vaccines until we got every
single case. Then there was
SARS in the early 2000s.
The disease spread quickly throughout
Asia and infected more than
8000 people with a
mortality rate of 9.6
percent. The Chinese government issued
a large scale quarantine to
try to contain the virus,
but it didn't exactly work.
In China during the SARS epidemic,
when the government announced a
quarantine area, 250000
people fled.
Well, that doesn't
help the epidemic.
Instead, what did work to contain
SARS was a combination of travel
warnings, detailed reporting of new
cases and close collaboration
between labs and scientists
around the world.
Most recently, there was the Ebola
epidemic from 2014 to 2016.
The virus that started in Africa
highlighted the need for U.S.
government officials to work with
international partners to fight the
disease at the source.
More than 2000 CDC staff were
deployed to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra
Leone during the epidemic.
President Barack Obama appointed Ron
Klain to oversee the government's
Ebola response in 2014.
In fighting Ebola, we had 11 federal
agencies involved in a major way,
17 involved in some ways that included
all of our agencies on the
international side, defense state,
USAID fighting the disease
overseas and included a lot of
efforts on the domestic side.
The U.S. government's response to
the Coronavirus pandemic has been
controversial. Some have criticized
the Trump administration for
being slow to respond and failing
to communicate the steps it's
taking to contain the outbreak.
White House officials are growing
increasingly frustrated at what they
see as President Trump's persistent
attempts to minimize the threat
posed by the outbreak.
In March, Congress
authorized an $8.3
billion spending package to
fight the Coronavirus.
It included billions of dollars
for vaccine research and preparation
efforts. The CDC has faced
criticism for distributing faulty test
kits and slowing down local
efforts to test the virus.
Meanwhile, health officials are still
trying to understand exactly
how it spreads.
Companies have encouraged workers to stay
home and limit travel, w
hile some states have even
banned large public gatherings.
The idea behind social distancing is is that
we kind of give up on the
fact that we're going to just stop
this disease, but we try to slow
it, we try to delay it.
Kind of buys us time before we
can get a specific treatment for
COVID-19 and ultimately a vaccine.
Experts agree clear communication from
the federal government and
social distancing measures are key
to containing this outbreak.
To help prevent the spread of
COVID-19, the CDC recommends taking
commonsense measures like washing your
hands, often avoiding touching
your eyes, nose or mouth, staying
home when you're sick and covering
your cough or sneeze.
What are my ethical and social
rebought responsibilities to my family,
to my neighbors, to my
community, to my nation?
And we need to recapture that
sense of the common good.
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