60 minutes overtime what began as an outbreak in china has become a worldwide epidemic
with more than a hundred thousand cases in more than 90 countries
there is no vaccine or specific drug to treat it instead there is hygiene and quarantine
i'm dr john lapook and a year ago we reported the very first 60 minutes piece on the pandemic
is there any reason to think it's not going to spread widely throughout the entire united states
it depends on the ability to do the kinds of public health measures that could have
an impact on the degree to which it spreads when you think that a year ago we said that as many as
20 people have died and now it's more than half a million it just takes your breath away i think
at the beginning of this it was hard to take it seriously for some people because they didn't
know anybody who had gotten sick they didn't know anybody who died and has that ever changed
it was the first monday in march when we realized we really needed to get going
and to help tell this story to the country denise schreierchetta was one of the producers i worked
with on that very first piece i remember reporting that story that week and realizing
that it was possible that the world was going to change pretty dramatically for a long time
the scariest moment for me in reporting was in that very first story you knew that the virus had
to be out there you couldn't see it you couldn't hear it it was invisible but you knew it had
to be out there and so we went to the emergency room at johns hopkins and we were talking about
where do we shoot but as we were on the ground we realized that we had to take a step back
this is our incident command center take a deep breath and realize that this was an
emerging pandemic and we couldn't just take that as far as we wanted and fortunately you
know dr lupuk was the correspondent and he had a great perspective on that so i kept our team
back away from where the sick patients were there were times when you just
you just can't take a chance so at 60 minutes in every piece we always scrutinize every single word
and one of the words that we debated as a team in the march story was whether or not
to use the word pandemic because the who had not called the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic yet
dr tom inglesby is the director of the johns hopkins center for health security do we have
a pandemic now i think this disease meets the definition of pandemic we have cases in all
continents it was only a few days after our piece that the world health organization officially said
okay this is a pandemic but really by the time we aired it had met the definition of a pandemic
when you have a story like this where there are so many unknowns you want to turn to real experts
people who have been through other infections other situations where there was a lot of
unknowns and of course dr anthony fauci was the obvious choice some people have been worried that
you've been muzzled i'm not muzzled because i'm talking to exactly you're right here you're okay
he always says sure i'll talk to you i just need to get clearance to do it
and it looked like very soon before we were supposed to do the interview we were off
fortunately with the help of of some people high up in government we were able to get it back on
again i think a lot of people are very interested in the relationship between the scientists and the
administration and specifically if president trump says something like at the beginning of february
like we think we have it under control you're in the room were you able to push back of course
it certainly was a clue very early on that it was not just open communication
and i think we've learned that there was an attempt to sort of control the message
i think what's been so unusual about reporting on the pandemic during the last year is that
it has impacted everybody similarly to 911 but even more so this is a a tragedy that has
blanketed the entire nation and the entire world so i think it's unlike any story most of us have
ever covered at the beginning of this pandemic i said look you know there's going to be a beginning
a middle and an end and i really do think we're at the beginning of the end we have a lot more at our
disposal now than we had a year ago we have these effective vaccines we have masks but we have to
understand that the battle's not over this is a time where everybody's got to pull together
because this pandemic is not going to be over for anyone until it's over for everyone