DUH? You post fakenews and silly bullshit...go away loser:
SECRETARY AZAR: Thank you, Dr. Redfield. I would now like to invite Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, to discuss the underlying rationale for the actions that I will be discussing after he concludes. Dr. Fauci.
DR. FAUCI: Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary. The concept that’s underlying the action that you’ll hear about shortly is the issue of the unknown aspects of this particular outbreak. So let me enumerate just a few of these.
I can start off by putting it into perspective by telling you I often get asked — we have an influenza outbreak here. We have about 8,000 deaths already. We have about 100,000 hospitalizations. Why are we paying such attention? And why are we doing the kinds of things we’re doing here right now?
Well, the reason is, despite the morbidity and mortality with influenza, there’s a certainty, for example, of seasonal flu. I can tell you all, guaranteed, that as we get into March and April, the flu cases are going to go down. You could predict pretty accurately what the range of the mortality is and the hospitalizations, as we’ve done over the years.
The issue now with this is that there’s a lot of unknowns. As you can see just from the media, the number of cases have steeply inclined each and every day. You know that, in the beginning, we were not sure if there were asymptomatic infection, which would make it a much broader outbreak than what we’re seeing. Now we know for sure that there are.
It was not clear whether an asymptomatic person could transmit it to someone while they were asymptomatic. Now we know from a recent report from Germany that that is absolutely the case.
There are a number of countries outside of China that have travel-related cases. And now what we’re seeing is that there are secondary cases from them, and, as Bob mentioned, we also have that in this country. The WHO has issued, as you know, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern declaration.
If you put all these things together, I underscore what Bob said: We still have a low risk to the American public, but we want to keep it at a low risk. And because there are so many unknowns here, we’re going to take the action that the Secretary will describe, in a temporary way, to make sure we mitigate, as best as we possibly can, this risk. Thank you.
SECRETARY AZAR: Thank you, Dr. Fauci.
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