- ...leaving you.
- We have 47 cases and eight deaths as of 5:00, this afternoon.
- It's a weekend. These numbers might be low.
People are staying home for a couple of days, see if they get any better.
- So at this point, I think we have to believe this is respiratory.
- Maybe fomites too. - What's that? fomites?
Uh... It refers to transmission from surfaces.
The average person touches their face two or three thousand times a day.
- Two or three thousand times a day?
- Three to five times every waking minute.
[inhales] In between, we're touching
doorknobs, water fountains, elevator buttons and each other.
Those things become fomites.
- Is this something we wanna release to the press? Respiratory and fomites?
- And how's the public gonna react to that?
- Hard to say.
Plastic shark in a movie will keep people from getting in the ocean,
but a warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes...
- We're gonna need to walk the governor through this
before we start to freak everybody out. - ...buying more.
- I mean,
we can't even tell people right now what they should be afraid of.
We tried that with swine flu and all we did was get healthy people scared.
It's the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
- I think we need to consider closing the schools down.
- And who stays home with the kids.
People that work at stores,
government workers, people that work at hospitals.
When will we know what this is?
What causes it? What cures it?
Things that keep people calm.
- What we need to determine... is this:
for every person who gets sick, how many other people are they likely to infect?
- So,
for seasonal flu that's usually about one.
Small pox, on the other hand, it's over three.
Now before we had a vaccine, polio spread at a rate between four and six.
Now, we call that number,
the R naught
R stands for the reproductive rate of the virus.
- Any idea is what that might be for this?
- How fast it multiplies depends on a variety of factors.
The incubation period, how long a person is contagious.
Sometimes, people can be contagious without even having symptoms.
We need to know that too.
[inhales]
and we need to know how big the population of people susceptible to the virus might be.
- So far that appears to be everyone with hands, a mouth and a nose.
- Once we know the R naught,
we'll be able to get a handle on the scale of the epidemic.
- So it's an epidemic now?
An epidemic of what?
- We sent samples to the CDC.
In... 72 hours, we'll know what it is,
if we're lucky.
- Clearly, we're not lucky.
- What do we got?
- A young woman in Minnesota, recently traveled to China. Son also died.
As of this morning, 87 cases, 15 deaths.
- You have a good Thanksgiving?
- hmm, I worked.
- You?