open, and they are shutting down but right after one more weekend of partying, revelry, and revenue. fun in the sun. please remember, tourism is -- or used to be -- a $40 billion business in the state of florida. and beaches in georgia are still open, and some of them crowded. and for the record, we hope for everybody's sake that this cruel virus finds a way to be kind to all who were there. that is our broadcast for this thursday night from our temporary satellite studio. thank you for being here with us and good night. i ask for your forbearance tonight if things look or sound a little different than you are used to. we are still trying out new options and new technology and new ways of working that are designed to keep this broadcast as resilient as it can be even as almost everybody who works on it is dispersed with the four winds.

tonight i can tell you we're going to be talking with one of the world's leading epidemiologists, who runs the center for communicable disease dynamics at harvard school of public health. we're going to be speaking with one of the world's most accomplished scientists when it comes to understanding viral dynamics and developing lifesaving antiviral treatment. the first results -- the results of the first major study of a potential drug treatment for coronavirus was published today. the results of that study were not good, but i want to hear from someone who knows these things about treatment possibilities and also about potential technological innovation that might get us some way forward on testing in this country. we're also going to be speaking tonight with a ph.d. biologist who was the white house official in charge of global health security and emerging infectious disease threats under president obama and under president trump for a while. i should tell you that she no longer has that job, and no one

has that job now because president trump inexplicably eliminated that job within the federal government for reasons that remain still unclear. but she's going to be joining us here tonight. all of those guests are going to be joining us over the course of this hour, and that's a kind of high-powered group of guests. i'm not saying that to brag. i'm telling you that it tells you something about the seriousness of this moment that we're in, that people like that, people who do work that important, are all at the same time recognizing that they need to stop their own work for a hot second because it's very important that they kplcommunic with the public about what they know. experts who are working at the highest levels on this crisis taking time to el it the public whats going on right now is a public service. we should all appreciate it. it's humbling for me as somebody who owns this little piece of public discourse to be able to bring them on. but, you know, people,

particularly people who have special expertise, are really stepping up wherever they can and however they can. here's one small example. the mayor of new york city made a public call for recently retired doctors and nurses to please sign up for the city's medical reserve corps. so those recently retired doctors and nurses could be called on to report for duty as we head into this emergency. more than 1,000 doctors and nurses responded within 24 hours of that call and signed themselves up. new york city has gone from nearly 2,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of yesterday to nearly 4,000 confirmed cases today. the number of cases in new york city more than doubled in one day. the rise in cases in new york city is undoubtedly due to an increase in testing and specifically an increase in the processing of tests in new york. but still, i mean, the numbers are what they are.

new york city has again almost 4,000 cases. they've got more than 500 people hospitalized right now for coronavirus. remember the rule of thumb is that the demand for hospitalization, including intensive care hospitalization, lags behind new infections by about three weeks. three weeks is about how long it takes roughly for people to go from getting infected to potentially needing intensive hospital care. keeping in mind that lag time is a really important single metric to keep in mind when you think about the public health threat and why the reaction to these rising cases in our country is as extreme as it is and probably needs to be significantly more extreme. i mean our ability to test as a country is still so terrible, is still so bad compared to the rest of the industrialized world, that we really don't have a grasp of how quickly people are being newly infected in this country. but, you know, again we've got some raw numbers.

more than 500 people hospitalized in new york city alone already. 169 people already in intensive care units in new york city while the number of confirmed cases just in that one city is doubling per day. i mean this is vertigo. this is standing on the edge of the abyss in terms of understanding our capacity to continue to treat sick people as the numbers rise. and the epidemic doesn't have the same shape all over the country. some places will be hit harder first. some will be hit harder later. some places might have gotten serious enough about social distancing measures fast enough to hold their part of the curve down further and longer than the rest of us will suffer. but the nationwide picture is not good. the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the united states as a whole, the number of confirmed cases doubled in the past two days in our country. and there remain places in the country that aren't doing much at all to try to slow down the

number of people getting infected even though we know the infection is in all 50 states. last night on this show we highlighted seven states that were doing almost nothing in terms of statewide measures to combat the spread of the disease. i singled out idaho, mississippi, missouri, oklahoma, tennessee, texas, and wyoming. as i reported last night, these states stood out because even as other states started to scale up their efforts and do their part, these states had no statewide mandates to limit gatherings of any size, no statewide mandates on bars or restaurants or any other businesses, no statewide mandates on schools. now, i should note while oklahoma was on that list last night, i was wrong to say last night that oklahoma hadn't closed their schools. the state board of education actually did order schools closed in oklahoma earlier this week. but oklahoma is the state where the governor this weekend tweeted out a picture of himself and his family at a crowded restaurant in oklahoma city, bragging about how packed it

was. and then his spokesman put out a supportive statement saying, the governor will continue to take his family out to dinner and to the grocery store without living in fear and encourages oklahomans to do the same. yeah, they're climbing down from that now. schools are now closed in oklahoma. i should mention there's still no statewide order from the governor limiting the size of gatherings in that state. there's still no order in oklahoma related to bars and restaurants and other businesses. some local governments are making those decisions as best they can, but the state is still basically awol. as of tonight, i should also mention that two of the five members of congress from oklahoma are in quarantine after potential exposure to the virus. i should also mention that the state's corrections department, the state prisons have announced in oklahoma that they will no longer accept any new prisoners being transferred from county jails. so it's not like they don't know they had a problem. since we singled out those seven states that were lagging last

night, three of those states -- mississippi, wyoming, and texas this afternoon changed course and decided finally for the first time they will institute some statewide restrictions. that leaves idaho, missouri, and tennessee, though, still i guess just, what, hoping for the best. assuming the best? presuming it will be fine? presuming other people will take care of them or something? meanwhile in pennsylvania tonight, the governor there ordered the closure of all non-life-sustaining businesses. governor tom wolf today ording non-life sustaining businesses to close their physical locations as of 8:00 p.m. tonight. enforcement actions will begin at 12:01 a.m. saturday. so midnight on friday. the state says in terms of enforcement actions, any business that doesn't comply with the order to shut down will not only forfeit their ability

to receive any disaster relief, they may also be subject to having their licensed yanked. violators, the state says, quote, are subject to fines or even imprisonment. so, you know, your results may vary depending on where you live and how on the ball your state government is and how much, you know, they decided to follow the early conservative media and presidential advice that this was all a hoax designed to flummox people, and it wasn't a real pandemic. your results may vary depending on where you are in the country. but i also want to show you something positive where actually the only footage i've got of it is from local news, and it's strange because honestly this is right now only a local story, but it ought to be getting national attention. what i want to show you here is something important that is happening finally in one corner of the country. the numbers nationwide suggest that this ought to be happening in a ton of places around the

country right now. this is what you should want to see in your region, in your city, in your state. but so far we only know of it happening in one place, in king county, washington. and the reason i can show you what's happening there is because we've got this report from king 5, which is the local nbc station in that part of the country. >> reporter: king county is also taking action, converting a soccer field near the shoreline pool on 1st avenue northeast into a temporary 200-bed hospital. tony? >> reporter: good evening to you. when we got here earlier this afternoon, there wasn't much up here beyond just this fence and closed signs and they've already made significant progress right now. the city says that they have pledged to do their part to help this global crisis. for some of the residents we spoke with, they said they get that, but this is still pretty weird. this soccer field in shoreline is turning into a temporary hospital where king county will

send those who are sick with the coronavirus or who have been exposed to it or could be. this is one of several locations king county has mentioned they are working on as sites. >> they're building a field hospital on a soccer field. this is king county, washington. part of the country that saw the first case, the first death, the first large cluster of coronavirus cases, the first large numbers of americans being hospitalized. this is also the county that bought a local hotel to use to try to protect their hospital capacity by having somewhere else appropriately outfitted where they could house people who needed to be isolated but who didn't need to be hospitalized, at least not yet. that first hotel they bought has 85 beds. they have since leased a second motel that they are getting up and running for the same purposes as well, and that same county now, in one day, put up the basing framing for what will soon be a pop-up 200-bed

hospital on a local sports field. in that county alone, in king county, washington, alone, they believe they need 3,000 additional beds to support their hospital capacity. rather than wring their hands about it, though, or wait for the federal government to get it together to start providing some sort of crash facilities, rather than even waiting for clear direction to local officials about what to do, king county is just getting on with it. they are building now themselves. 200 beds will be on that soccer field soon. they've got more in those requisitioned hotels and motels and they're still looking to build or find more than 2,000 other beds, and they're going to do it. they're trying to get those beds up right now, right away. buy them, repurpose them, build them right now. protect your hospitals because if your hospitals get to the point where they cannot care for sick people anymore, the lived experience of the epidemic in your community will pretty quickly turn stone age.

king county, washington, is doing it. why aren't more places in the country doing that? it's not like we don't know what the start of the influx looks like and feels like. in massachusetts last night we talked about how shortages of key equipment were leading to breakdowns even in the conduct of the minimal testing that we're doing in this country. "the boston globe" reporting last night that massachusetts hospitals were rationing the availability of the coronavirus test even when they had tests to give because they had a shortage of the long swabs they need to take the samples that ultimately go to the testing facilities. well, they also need to take care of and protect health professionals when they're administering those tests. tonight the massachusetts medical society, the professional association for doctors in the state, put out a statement saying they cannot safely administer the tests they have got, even if they've got swabs and even if they've got tests, because doctors in massachusetts right now don't

have enough protective gear to keep themselves safe, to keep themselves from getting infected while they're administering these tests. statement from the association, quote, the shortage of personal protective equipment is a dire situation. if we have access to testing kits, we cannot safely administer the test without appropriate ppe. to do so without precaution would jeopardize the health and safety of our patients and the health care workforce. again, that's the massachusetts medical society tonight saying the lack of protective gear for doctors is so dire, it means they right now cannot even safely administrator the test to people in the state of massachusetts. tonight the president of mass general in boston, one of the great hospitals in the world, put out a plea. i kid you not, for people who have 3-d printers to please start 3-d printing masks for doctors and health workers to use at the hospitals.

in evansville, indiana, tonight, one hospital is asking the public to fire up their sewing machines and please start sewing cdc-compliant cloth face masks for use at the hospital. they made a video of a person with a sewing machine putting one together to show people how to sew one of these masks that they might be able to use at your local hospital. they say they're going to sterilize the masks before they distribute them, but they've literally published a sewing pattern to help people learn how to sew these themselves and donate them because that's what the hospitals are down to. the vice president today at the white house and the president both gave a very cheery presentation about how millions of masks are available. everything's fine with the masks. yeah, millions of masks coming online. yeah, ask at the hospitals. here's the headline in "the new york times" tonight. quote, it feels like a war zone. doctors and nurses plead for

masks on social media. quote, as supplies have dwindled, doctors and nurses have improvised ways to make their stock last. an intensive care use in illinois was told to make a single use mask last for five days. an emergency room doctor in california said her cliegs had started storing dirty masks in plastic containers to use again later with different patients. a pediatrician in washington state trying to make her small stock last has been spraying each mask with alcohol after use until the masks break down. here's a second story on the same fricking problem. doctors and nurses plead for masks and other equipment. quote, the open cities community health center in st. paul, minnesota, is considering shutting its doors because of a dwindling supply of face masks. doctors at barnes jewish hospital in st. louis have been forced to perform invasive procedures with loose fitting surgical masks rather than the tight respirator masks. another one los angeles

emergency room, doctors examining a suspected coronavirus patient were given a box of expired masks. when they tried to secure them to their faces, the elastic bands snapped. with cases soaring, doctors, nurses and other front line medical workers across the u.s. are confronting a dire shortage of masks, surgical gowns and eye gear. at a white house briefing today, mr. trump said millions of masks were in production and that the federal government had made efforts to address the shortages. but he said it was largely up to governors to deal with the problem. quote, the federal government isn't supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping, mr. trump said. you know, we're not a shipping clerk, he said. he said there were no immediate plans to activate the defense production act, which authorizes presidents to take extraordinary action to force american industry to ramp up production of equipment needed for national security. the president said in explanation, quote, we hope we're not going to need it. the president's optimistic statements contrasted starkly

with the situation on the ground. rebeck rebecca bartels said it was only a matter of days before some of that system's 51 hospitals and 800 clinics run out entirely of personal protective equipment. she said, quote, we're on mile one of a marathon. if we're out of protective equipment now, what does mile 25 look like? i don't know why at the white house today they bragged about all these millions of masks being available. i don't know where they are counting those millions. but the situation in the hospitals with the health care providers who are already actually coping with patients and infection right now, that's the only place that the count matters. again, the key thing to keep in mind here, if you're going to keep one metric in mind here for our country, keep this metric in mind. three weeks.

the three-week lag time between when people become newly infected and when critical patients start turning up at the hospital, highly infectious and in need of intensive care. this is the rate of increase in new confirmed cases in the united states right now, and that is still with us having an absolutely ridiculously low number of tests being performed. but that's the rate of increase that we're seeing, and it's all 50 states. as a rule of thumb, the crush at the hospitals starts three weeks after initial infection. look how fast those test results are rising. it is go time right now for heroic marshaling of resources to keep doctors and nurses safe so they can stay on the job. it's go time right now for building out hospital overflow capacity, building it, requisitioning it, repurposing it, just doing it, not just talking about it, doing it right now. now is the time this stuff needs to happen. joining us now is somebody who knows what government can do in a situation like this. beth cameron served as the

senior director for global health security and biodefense, the white house pandemic prevention office. she was there through the early months of the trump administration, but president trump thereafter shuttered that office a couple years ago. he closed it in 2018 for reasons that remain to be explained. beth cameron is now at the nuclear threat initiative. thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. i really appreciate it. >> thanks for having me. >> first let me just ask you if i said anything in those opening remarks or in those reports that strike you as wrong or wrong-headed or putting the wrong emphasis on anything. >> no. i think you're absolutely right. particularly right now, i'm happy that the president invoked the defense production act, but i'm really nervous about the need to actually implement that act because as you rightly said, we're seeing personal protective

equipment shortages. we're worried about ventilator shortages and swabs that you mentioned as well. this is not really a united states problem. it's a global problem. i also would like to see the united states leading, working with partners and allies to address these shortages all over the world. >> one of the things that we've started to see requested or recommended or asked about by some front-line health care providers who are, you know, asking for help, who are trying to raise the alarm about what's going on, is the question of whether there ought to be or whether there could be a federal role in essentially monitoring the personal protective equipment needs around the country, figuring out where the need is most acute, where the shortages are most dire and most consequential, and coordinating some sort of federal role to make sure that the equipment that we've got gets to the places where if is most needed. is that the kind of thing that a coordinated -- a federal coordinator working on something

like this could do? >> yes. i absolutely think so, and i think that it's something that a white house pandemics office would be doing and should be doing. not to be the ones to actually monitor the actual numbers but to make sure that the departments and agencies in the united states understood where the shortages actually are and hopefully the federal government and the department of health and human services is doing that right now. i think it would be really, really important to understand exactly where our supply chain is for personal protective equipment. i think there is a disconnect between the numbers that we're hearing in the press conferences and the reports that we're getting on the ground. i think it's also important for us to understand what the supply chain for personal protective equipment is all over the world. the world health organization, the world bank, the world economic forum, which is a group that brings together companies are monitoring the supply chain for personal protective equipment, which is a global supply chain. so it's really important for us to understand where we can go to

get more personal protective equipment, where we can buy it from and also really to ramp up obstructi production and really to do it now. >> let me ask you about the steps taken in king county, washington right now. king county was hard hit early on. they were coping with this in a way that other places in the united states weren't first. and they've made some decisions at the local level. i mean obviously in coordination with the state and federal government to a certain extent. but they've made their own decisions. they've taken over hotels and motels. as of today they've started setting up a tent 200-bed hospital on a local soccer field. this is local authorities taking the initiative. they reportedly think they need 3,000 additional beds to supplement their hospital capacity locally right now, and they are building them out and finding them and repurposing them. dozens or hundreds of beds at a time. in other places around the country, people aren't taking the same kind of initiative.

should there be directives from the federal government to states and cities to get them to do stuff like this. should state and local officials recognizes that's not going to come from the federal government and they should start doing it on their own say-so? >> i think there needs to be a lot more communication about what exactly states should be doing and at what place in the crisis they should be doing it. so one of the things that we're working on with other organizations is how to get decision support to people who are making the decisions -- mayors, governors, people in their offices because right now the states are doing a lot of the leading. i think it's encouraging to see what's happening in seattle and king county and around the country, but i do think that there's a lot of confusion that we're hearing about when to start pulling triggers on things like creating new field hospitals to improve bed capacity or when they should be looking at school closures. we were hearing that a few weeks ago before more states started closing schools as a larger measure. so i do think that there's a role for the federal government in providing not only really

good public health guidance, which the cdc does provide, but clear guidance to decision makers at the state and local level. i don't think that they should be on their own. but right now they are leading. >> they are leading and some of the best leadership in the country is literally at a horizontal level from localities and states to look at each other and find out who has the best ideas. beth cameron, former senior director for biodefense at the national security council, i job that i wish still existed. she's now vice president for global biological policies. i appreciate you being here and sharing your expertise. >> thanks so much for having me. we've got much more to get to tonight. as i mentioned, we're going to be speaking with one of the world world's leading epidemiologist and anti-therapy aueutic researchers. stay with us. yeah, actually i'me last look at my dashboard

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last night we brought you some fascinating new reporting about a company that now sort of as a matter of happenstance has ended up tracking the coronavirus in realtime in a way that i'm not sure anybody else is able to. it's a company called kinsa health that makes thermometers. they take your temperature, tell you whether or not you're running a fever, but you also hook them up to an app. through that app, they transmit the data about what temperature

they're taking of all kinsa thermometer users around the country. they transmit that data to the company, and the company then puts that data on a map. and their thermometers were in over a million households nationwide, so that's over a million data points nationwide. every time somebody uses one of those thermometers. through their maps, they've become uncannily good at tracking who has fevers around the country and what that translates to. in a normal year, that translates into them being really good at tracking which americans have the regular flu and where. they have these interactive maps that have accurately predicted the spread of flu around the u.s. about two weeks before the cdc is able to do so. now they're using this same technology to crack ttrack the coronavirus in realtime. they're looking at what fever data they'd expect to see under normal cold and flu season conditions and comparing that with the fever readings they're seeing now, ones that are over and above what would be those

normal conditions. what they find when they compare those two data sets has turned out to be very helpful in identifying places where epidemiologists and public health folks maybe ought to be looking, maybe places where testing efforts ought to be directed, may where preparations for people being hospitalized ought to be geared up. take a look at this map that is being regularly updated by kinsa health. this is what it shows as of right now. as you can see right at the top, it says it's tracking atypical illness. that means it's tracking fevers that are higher than you would normally expect to see this time of year. and as you can see, florida is kind of lit up on this map. it's not the only place, but more than any other place. florida has a particularly high amount of atypical fevers being reported right now, and that's just one data point, but it is striking and it's worrying and it's probably cause for public health attention. it's particularly worrying to see stuff like this because we're relying on data points

like this one in the absence of real widespread testing in the united states. it's something that's being radically ramped up in other countries. yesterday, for example, we talked about a town in northern italy called vo. there's only about 3,300 people in that town, but it was the site of the first coronavirus death in italy. after that, they decided they would do an experiment in the town and test every single resident there. what they found was that some of the people who came back as positive were completely asymptomatic. these were people who would otherwise never have been tested had they kept to these rules that say you should only test people who have symptoms. had they not tested everyone, they wouldn't have found those positive but asymptomatic people. because they did test everyone, even the people who were asymptomatic, they were able to isolate positive cases, all the positive cases. with that information, the town has now gone days without any new cases being reported there at all. today there's a sort of similar

story out of the small nation of iceland. iceland is now carrying out large-scale testing of its general population. already they've tested a larger proportion of their citizens than any other country on earth. the country's chief epidemiologist says the goal there is to try to find the actual prevalence of the virus in that country's population as a whole. again, most countries are only testing symptomatic people or people thought to have been exposed. in iceland they're trying to test everyone, including non-symptomatic people with no known exposure, just like they did in that little town in italy. what they found in iceland thus far is in line with what they found in that little town in italy. they're finding a bunch of people who are testing positive who are non-symptomatic. in iceland, it's about half the people who are testing positive are non-symptomatic. they would never be identified had they not been testing everyone. more and more what we're learning from the places that have tons of testing is that asymptomatic people have it and can transmit it. the question is how do we in

this country respond to that news? could we live in this country for a while as if we are all positive, just assuming that we're all positive? i mean we're not testing widely. we're not even testing narrowly. we're not even testing nearly the number of people who have symptoms in this country. if we can't do mass surveillance testing where everybody who is positive is identified, should we, even those of us who are asymptomatic assume that we're positive and behave accordingly. do we have the will as a country to do that? if we don't, what's the next best thing? i have just the guy to ask. that's next. he's the one. gesundheit. [sneezes] i see something else... a star... with three points. you're in a... mercedes. yeah, we wish. wish granted. with four models starting under 37 thousand, there could be a mercedes-benz in your very near future at the spring event.

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at the end of the day, we're one body. there's a mutuality and there's a recognition of our interdependence that requires of this moment that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home. that directive goes into force and effect this evening, and we

were confident -- we are confident that the people of the state of california will abide by it. they'll do the right thing. they'll meet this moment. they'll step up as they have over the course of the last number of weeks to protect themselves, to protect their families, and to protect the broader community in this great state and the world that we reside in. i have confidence in that. >> that's the governor of california, gavin newsom, speaking just moments ago, announcing a remarkable order. california is a state of 40 million people, and the governor tonight has just ordered a stay-at-home order statewide starting tonight. there had been an earlier order related specifically to los angeles, the largest city in california. there had also been what they were calling a shelter in place order in effect in the san francisco bay area, multiple counties around the san

francisco bay area. but now california governor gavin newsom ordering statewide a stay-at-home order as of this evening because of the coronavirus crisis. that's just happened moments ago. joining us now live is dr. mark lipsich. professor, thank you very much for joining us tonight. i really appreciate you making the time. >> thank you for having me. >> part of the reason i wanted to talk with you is because you issued some of the first public estimates that made -- sort of took my breath away in terms of the number -- the amount of the existing population that could ultimately become infected with this virus. also because recently you have been saying very bluntly -- i'll quote you here -- there are two options for covid-19 at the moment, long-term social distancing or overwhelmed health care systems. i'm worried at this point that we are going to have both. >> well, i think that is a real

risk, and the statements you described earlier about efforts to mobilize the country are both encouraging where there's some progress and really discouraging that the progress is not uniform and that the federal leadership does not seem to be taking seriously the idea that we have to prepare not only for rapidly getting supplies of personal protective equipment and testing kits and all of that, but also for dealing with the disruption that this will cause to people's lives, the economy, their social well being, and other things, and education. so there's a lot to be done, and it feels as though individual places are very hopeful like king county that you described earlier and other, but the general picture is really uneven. >> let me ask you about this new

announcement from california's governor. obviously california the most populous state in the country. it's also a massive place. we had seen local efforts, those six counties in san francisco put in place a strict stay-at-home order. we then saw palm springs do a similar order. now we're seeing, as announced by the governor tonight, statewide. in new york there's been discussion about whether or not that should happen in new york city, which has its numbers of cases absolutely skyrocketing and already 500 people in the hospital, heading toward 200 people in intensive care already. the governor has said he doesn't want to do something like that for new york state or for new york city. do you think that those measures are warranted even though it may be hard to sustain them in the long term? >> i think we need to pretty much pull out all the stops right now in order to slow things down, in order to give us time to build up supplies of all these things that we need to respond, and also in order to make an informed decision about

how we're going to manage this over the long term. this is a very long-term problem. if we do manage to slow the spread of the infection, that means that we are in this position where we're waiting for cases slowly to occur so that we begin to build up immunity in the population. but the more effective we are at slowing the spread, which we have to do to protect the health care system, the slower that buildup of immunity will be. so we need to sort of slam on the brakes now in order to preclude an overwhelming of intensive care as you described earlier. and then we need to figure out ways to mitigate the problem, both the disease itself and the consequences of the social distancing. >> one of the things that you've talked about is using the time that we can earn ourselves, the time before health systems are

overwhelmed, use that hopefully to try to innovate, to try to develop new ways that we don't know now of how to cope with it and how to try to lessen the impact. i wonder if in your thinking about this, you're factoring into that the possibility of an effective treatment, if not a cure, something that lessens the severity of illness, something that might be able to keep people out of the intensive care units? is that something that you think we should consider to be -- that we should reasonably hope for in terms of our arsenal? >> absolutely. i know there are a number of efforts to test existing chemical entities, drugs, that have been approved as safe and effective for other things. there are screening efforts of other chemical compounds under way, and we don't know what's going to work and what's not. i am cautiously hopeful that we will find something, that the research will find something. but we have to slow things down enough so that that has time to

occur. we also could do things like what seattle is doing and expand our hospital capacity and make a large effort to get a greater supply of ventilators and other intensive care equipment. that would not only cushion the blow on the health care system, but our models suggest it would also help to speed up the process of building of herd immunity because we can afford to have more cases if we have greater health care capacity. those are two of the issues. we also need to redouble our efforts to get to a vaccine and think about new and innovative ways to test those vaccines that may be faster. all of these are uncertain, and each one may not be -- may not pan out. but if we don't try all these different efforts, then we will be sorry that we haven't.

>> marc lipsitch, the director of the center for communicable disease dynamics at the harvard school of public health, thank you very much for your time tonight. thank you for your work and for taking time to talk to the public about it. i really appreciate it. >> thank you. up next, one of the foremost doctors in infectious disease and particularly in antiviral medication joins us live next. stay with us. tv sports announcer: time out. let's go to a commercial. nooooooo! not another commercial! when you bundle your home, auto and life insurance with allstate you could save 25%. in fact, the more you bundle the more you can save. put the other game on if it's important to you allstate can protect it. ...home auto and life insurance you could save 25%. if it's important to you allstate can protect it. what? bundle and save with allstate. click or call for a quote today.

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medicine" published results today of one study of a potential treatment for seriously ill patients with coronavirus. this is one of the first major treatment studies so far. unfortunately it was not a success. this was about the combination of two antiviral drugs that's currently used to treat hiv. it turned out to have no efficacy against coronavirus. the pandemic has developed so rapidly that doctors and scientists are trying a whole range of existing drugs, including antiviral drugs, to see if they might work. but so far it hasn't made a difference in mortality. the good news is this is only the beginning. this was just the first study. it's also good news that some of the best scientists in the world are racing to find effective treatments for coronaviruses. scientists like dr. david ho. dr. ho's groundbreaking hiv research changed the course of the aids epidemic in the 1990s. he's leading a team of researchers at columbia university trying to find a cure for this new coronavirus that has turned our world upside down. joining us now is dr. david ho.

dr. ho, welcome back to the program. it's good to see you again. i'm sorry we have to do this by skype. >> good to see you, rachel. >> let me put a couple of just clear questions to you, and you can tell me whether they're the right questions to be asking. the first is what the prospects are, to your mind, for developing therapeutics, treatments for this virus. obviously this first test that was published in "new england journal of medicine" was a failure, but how do you feel about the prospects for developing something that could save lives? >> well, in the long term, i feel the prospects are good. but unfortunately we're in the midst of an explosive outbreak, and we need to have solutions for patients now. so the idea of repurposing approved drugs to apply to the most severely ill patients is

the appropriate thing. but the study you just cited is repurposing an hiv drug called lopinivir for treating covid-19. as you read, it's unsuccessful. it's not all that surprising because we knew the activity was rather low. and i think the president was referring to closure o'quinn, which is a drug that we take for malaria, particularly if one is traveling to regions that are endemic for that parasite. and it's been reported to have low-level activity, and there's some flat-out statements made by chinese scientists and doctors that it was helpful. but it was helpful in maybe shortening the course of the infection or the course of the disease by a little bit. but there's no evidence that it made a huge difference in terms of mortality or survival.

>> one of the reasons i wanted to come back to you on this, particularly looking at that study today, is you had talked about the kind of time frame we should have in mind if a new drug is found or if a drug is found that was effective against coronavirus. if it turns out that a drug is found that is being repurposed from another purpose, something that has been tested and proven effective in human patients for other conditions and it also works against coronavirus, would that significantly shorten the amount of time that it would take to get something like that distributed if, in fact, that was the path to a cure or an effective treatment? >> yes. for a licensed drug, then we could immediately apply it. but some of the drugs that are not yet licensed but have gone through human testing -- for example, there's another drug called remdesivir which is being tested. the rationale behind that usage is, in fact, higher in that

remdesivir has been shown to have activity against the sars coronavirus, which is highly related to covid-19, and also against another coronavirus called mers. and there are two large clinical trials that are ongoing in mainland china, and we should have readout in the near future. and if that should work, that drug could certainly be scaled up reasonably quickly. but repurposing a drug to be an effective agent against covid-19, we would have to be very, very lucky. i think the most effective drugs are going to be newly discovered, and that's going to take time. as we previously discussed, that's likely to take a year, 18 months, or even two years. >> dr. david ho, scientific director and ceo of the aaron diamond aids research center, a legend in the field of antiviral

research. thank you very much for your time tonight. i hope to talk to you whenever we can. thank you. >> thank you, rachel. >> all right. we'll be right back. stay with us. with usbut what in is boost high protein. and now, introducing new boost women... with key nutrients to help support thyroid, bone, hair and skin health. all with great taste. new, boost women. designed just for you. new, boost women. missions in iraq as aand afghanistan.89 combat as a national security advisor, i worked to keep our country safe. i'm amy mcgrath. now i'm running for senate in kentucky against mitch mcconnell. i can win, but i need your help. with your contribution, we can finally remove mitch mcconnell from office and start repairing the damage he's done to our country. i approved this message... because this is gonna take all of us. t-mobile has the first and only nationwide 5g network. experience it on a samsung galaxy s20 5g. right now, when you buy one, you get one free. plus get 2 lines of unlimited and 5g access included,

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nbc will be hosting a special report on the coronavirus that will feature a number of important guests including dr. anthony fauci from the nih. you are going to want to watch this. stay with us. us >> we are dealing with a crisis that we have never seen in our lifetime. >> do not send your children to schools. >> no one should be on the streets. >> the health care system braces for the worst. >> it wasn't like any sickness that i've had before. >> felt like i had a belt around my chest. t >> we're seeing a lot of peoplee just kind of freaking out. >> borders closing. public spaces and stores emptying out. officials scrambling to respond. >> nobody knew there would be a pandemic of this proportion. >> markets tumbling, businesses closing. emos >> we need help now. >> it's like a nightmare that doesn't end. >> families hunkering down. >> this is our reality for the next few weeks. >> how bad will it get? >> it's been very frightening. >> this is a character test for all of us. >> ts