The Coronavirus is spreading around the 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.