Sunday School 4/5/20

Today I'm going to devote the whole lesson to the classroom with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. 

First up? The Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Jerome Adams, who also visited another classroom today. Let's start there, with Wallace asked how bad things are going to get for us, how long the darn epidemic is going to last here. Adams didn't pull any punches.

Well, it's tragically fitting that we're talking at the beginning of Holy Week because this is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans' lives, frankly. This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it's not going to be localized. It's going to be happening all over the country. And I want American to understand that.  

He also emphasized that we all have the power to change the trajectory, and

...I want Americans to understand that as hard as this week is going to be, there is a light at the end of the tunnel if everyone does their part for the next 30 days...there is hope. But we've got to all do out part. 

They talked about mitigation efforts, with Wallace noting there are still nine states without stay-at-home orders. He shared some of the president's comments, including that "the states we're talking about are not in jeopardy." Is he wrong, Wallace asked? 

Adams said over 90% of the country is under stay-at-home orders, and that they've been balancing states rights and the federal government's role, pointing to the uproar at the suggestion of a quarantine in the NYC area. He reiterated that he'd ask the nine governors to give us whatever they can over the next several days, a week or two, to help us get us to the other side of the peak.

Wallace asked whether Adams is "comfortable with people taking an unproven untested drug, (referring to hydroxychloroquine) even people who don't have the virus?" Adams noted it's all about the desire to help however they can.

And the last question was on masks (you can watch Adams demonstrates how to make one here), including this bizarre comment by the president (there's always one of those isn't there?), about greeting "presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens.... I don't know. Somehow I don't see it for myself." 

Does that statement from Trump send a mixed message, Wallace wondered? It's voluntary, Adams noted, and there are people who are making sure the president is practicing social distancing (even though we watch him ignore the rules daily) but, he said, the mask is not to protect you, it's to protect your neighbor.

And so we shall wear masks when we go out. 

Next up was philanthropist Bill Gates, in a taped interview.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation  has pledged $100M to fight the coronavirus. Five years ago, Gates predicted that missiles wouldn't be our biggest threat - microbes would be. Wallace wondered how dangerous, "how fearsome" this virus is and how it'll play out here. 

Calling it a "nightmare scenario" because this kind of respiratory virus can "grow exponentially," Gates noted if we'd kept on doing what we normally do, we'd be in pretty dire straits. But, quarantining like we're doing, the social distancing stuff, 

if we use that well enough, we should towards the end of this month start to see those numbers level off and then if we continue country-wide and we're testing the right people to understand what's going on, which is not the case yet, those numbers will start to go down and then we can look at some degree of opening back up.

Wallace asked if Gates thought the administration's numbers, somewhere between 100,00 - 240,000 deaths over the next two months, sounded right. He said if we do the social distancing right, "we should be able to get out of this with the death number well short of that." And, he said he's glad that the estimate is out in circulation,

because a lot of people are still thinking hey, "this is like normal," not waking up every day to a completely new reality... You know, Dr. Fauci is doing a very good job here of saying the numbers are what count here.  

He said that the various models people are doing all show things could be even worse without the behavior changes from our mitigation efforts.

But I do think if we get the testing fixed, we get all 50 states involved, we'll be below that. Of course, we'll pay a huge economic price in order to achieve that.

Gates said we don't yet know how seasonal this strain is but it would be beneficial if we got a seasonal break with it. That would give us time to get the drugs we need and to advance the vaccine, a high-volume vaccine, that's  could be available world-wide.

Wallace wondered how much the government's slow start cost, in terms of  the spread of the disease. Rather than focusing on what we lost, Gates looked to other countries and what they did and how that helped.

There are countries like Taiwan, who are exemplary: saw the problem and really got the testing, community-wide testing done very well. They prioritized who got tested and so they won't either have the disease burden or the economic effect that other countries will have. China, by late January had taken it seriously - and so, their ability to get the cases down has been dramatic. South Korea has done that.

We're learning from what's happened, Gates said, and he also made it clear that this is a global issue, that "we're all in this together."

We've got to get rid of coronavirus from the entire world. You know, the US, we can see how tough it is here; likely it will be even worse in the developing countries who as yet don't have nearly as many cases. 

He also talked about testing in some detail, and how some folks might be missing the point, although he didn't name names.

...people have gotten confused and think it's just about numbers. the key is that you have to have a response to the test in less than 24 hours. And that you're prioritizing the right people...that allocation, prioritization of testing will be a key tactic for us to get into good shape. 

And, he agreed when Wallace asked if that should be done at the national level not a state level.  He also said that we're having to take more of an ad hoc approach, "because we never did a full-blown simulation."

There were a few things done, but it's not like war where we do war games all the time, we have people standing by, resources standing by in a dramatic level. You know, we're kind of figuring this out as we go...people are rising to the occasion and, you know, it's fantastic to see that, but, you know, every day we can see that case number is still going up.

Gates said that it's hard for people to put money into something that may never happen; we do it for fires, he said, because we've seen over time that we need to. And of course, we do it for war, too, he said - $600B a year's worth. But in the five years since he talked about this

less than 5% of what should have been done was done... people didn't get that this is the biggest single threat that could disrupt our way of life...even having predicted that as a risk. I'm really stunned at how...tough it is to go through this....the medical cost, the economic cost, the psychological cost. Everybody's lives have been completely upended and that's not just the United States, it's almost the entire world.

Before the interview ended, Gates gave us one more pep talk, reminding us that this was not the worst case. The fatality rate here, around 1%, is actually nothing like the 30% it would be if it were, say, smallpox.

This is super, super bad, but, you know, we will eventually get a vaccine. Even before that, if we do the right things, we'll be able to open up significant parts of the economy... I'm sure...once we get past this, we'll look back, understand what we could have done differently, and make sure that we're not letting it happen again... 

That's something we should take to heart.

Stay home as much as possible. If you do go out, practice social distancing, and wear a home-made mask. Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Safely check on your neighbors. Do what you can to help your favorite small businesses. Be patient. Smile.

See you around campus.