France and Israel are closing restaurants and other nonessential businesses, and here at home, the numbers continue to climb.

Take a look at this map from last week and now there are more than 2900 known cases in 49 states and Washington, D.

C.

That's every state except West Virginia.

At least 59 deaths have been reported.

Our fight against an invisible enemy has turned life in America upside down.

Mass gatherings put on hold.

Almost 26 million students are out of school, and more and more of us are working from home as our nation faces this crisis.

Our goal each day is to provide you with reliable information to separate rumor from fact, to understand the true scope of this pandemic and what we should do to protect ourselves, our families, our neighbors.

But to be blunt, your ability to make informed decisions is impaired.

When we hear things like this, we have contained this.

I won't say a Rh type pretty close to air tight when you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is gonna be down to close to zero.

Uh, that's a pretty good job with this'd is a flu.

This is like a flu.

Anybody that needs a test, it's a test of Americans coming back or anybody's coming back with testing.

We have a tremendous testing set up where people coming in have to be tested.

Each of those statements were either highly misleading or flatly wrong, and further misinformation in a primetime Oval Office address this week caused more confusion.

This is a time we need to be able to trust the information coming from the federal government and when any inaccurate information impairs our ability to understand what is happening and to do what is needed to halt the spread of this disease, this is not a matter of political spin.

This is now a matter of life and death, health and sickness.

This morning, we will try to get more clarity.

Our first guest joins me Now.

Dr Anthony Fauci.

Dr.

Fauci, thank you for being here good to be with you.

You have said that they're gonna beam or Corona virus cases and you've talked about flattening the curve.

We've all seen the graph.

Still take another look at the graph now trying to slow the spread of the disease.

But one thing that that graph is missing his numbers right on.

I know you don't have precise numbers, but can you try to help us understand?

When will life get back to normal?

When How long does this last?

You know, it's going to be a matter of, you know, several weeks, too few months for sure.

If you look at the dynamics of how outbreak curves go, you just need to take a look at China and take a look at South Korea right now with China.

They went to their peak and they're coming down right now.

There were just a day or so ago 11 new cases in China, which is minuscule compared to where it was.

Korea is starting to flatten and maybe come down a little.

If you look at that bracket.

All of that was a couple of months, a month and 1/2 for China and about the same.

Although you can't predict accurately the way you interfere with that and not only diminish the peak of the curb, but even, perhaps the duration depends on the effectiveness in which you do the kinds of controls that we've been talking about, the containment in the mitigation.

So do we think that Korea do we think China are?

Are through this largely?

Is it largely over?

You know, it's over for now and hopefully for good.

But the one thing that we have to keep an eye on on John is that China really dramatically did what we call social distancing.

They just shut down the country as they start getting back to normal personal interaction.

I hope we don't see the second blip, but it's possible.

So we're looking.

We know favorably at the fact that China is coming down, but we also want to look carefully to see what happens when they resume normal life.

And that's one of the things that we're interested in.

Hopefully, it'll stay down, but it possibly could come back up.

That flattened curve suggests that by flattening the curve by doing all the mitigation, it actually lasts longer, and it looks like roughly I mean, is it the same number of people ultimately get infected?

No, no, not at all is a matter of fact.

I mean, the way the way the curve is shown on on the graph, you showed it might look like the area under the curve is the same.

That that would be misleading, John, really is.

The peak is less and and the numbers total would be less So You are probably the most trusted person on this.

Do you?

Are you confident that the federal government is doing everything that needs to be done right now to contain this right now, John?

Yes, absolutely.

And the fact is, what would I like to see is when people look at what we're doing and say you're overreacting for me.

The dynamics in the history of outbreaks is you were never where you think you are with it with the If you think you're in line with the outbreak, you're already three weeks behind, so you got to be almost overreacting a bit to keep up with it.

The New York Times Ah, had a story this weekend about the worst case scenarios and some projections that were they said, presented at the CDC about a about a month ago.

Uh, let's take a look at these.

160 million to 214 million people infected in the United States, 2.4 million to 21 million people hospitalized, 200,000 deaths, perhaps as much as 1.7 million deaths.

First of all, what do you make of those?

So whenever people model and take a model, which that's exactly what that is, a model ah, model is on Leah's good as the assumptions you put into the murder.

So when you do a model, you say, What happens if it's the lowest?

Sits here and what happened is the highest.

The worst case scenario is either you do nothing or your mitigation and contain mints don't succeed.

So although that's possible, it is unlikely if we do the kinds of things that were essentially outlining right now.

So help me out.

What is the range of possibilities?

How many people do you think based on what we're doing, based on what you know, in your expertise on this, what are we telling you?

I don't think it's gonna be that worst because I think what we're doing is gonna have an effect.

And, for example, the president's decision to to essentially have a major blocking of travel from China that already had an effect of not ceding the way in Europe.

Italy didn't do that.

And my I feel so bad because I have so many friends there.

They're getting hit hard, what we're doing now with the other travel restrictions.

So you block infections from coming in, and then within is when you have containment and mitigation.

And that's the reason why the kinds of things we're doing that may seem like an overreaction will keep us away from that worst case scenario.

So are we prepared from whatever you think the worst case scenario would be is our health care system.

But, I mean, I saw Seema Verma this week say that there are about 13,000 respirators in stockpile 13,001.

We're looking at a vassal latest venture.

Ventilators.

I'm sorry.

Ventilator.

Okay, that doesn't sound.

That doesn't sound like anywhere near enough.

Or are we prepared?

Yeah, that that may not be enough if we have a situation where we really have a lot of cases, but John.

Let's make sure people need to understand that things will get worse before they get better.

What we're trying to do is to make sure they don't get to the worst case scenario.

That's what we need to do and look at the way life is starting to stop here.

But we see different localities doing different things.

Some cities or banning Ganor or banning gatherings over 250 some 500.

What should be done?

Shall we be seeing restaurant shut down like we're seeing happening in Israel in Spain right now, Should should we basically be in a shutdown mode?

You know, what we should be doing is absolutely making it much, much different, not business as usual.

You got to just chill down some areas of the country, particularly the areas where it's clear you're having a lot of community spread maybe more vigorous and shutting things down.

Right now, people are taking things on their own.

No matter how you say 50 people is the limit.

And then people say no, no, we don't want anybody.

We're just gonna shut down things and the number doesn't matter, does it would matter how, how densely exactly.

Exactly exactly.

So.

What we really got to do is we got as much as possible, but But we don't want to lose sight of the fact that when you're doing that into personal interaction that you're tryingto calm down and you would have a word you want Chill, slow down.

We gotta be.

Make sure that the vulnerable ones of the ones we protect the vulnerable the elderly and those would underlying conditions.

Those are the people that if you say, should you kind of stay in your house, not go to a movie, not go to a restaurant For the most part, maybe most people shouldn't do that.

But the ones who really shouldn't do that of the vulnerable for those living with developments.

All right, so yeah, exactly.

So what about travel restrictions?

Are we going to see domestic travel restrictions?

And we know we have hot spots.

We have Washington state.

We have parts of California, New York should be traveled direction.

We sit around with the task force.

We talk about every possibility travel restrictions within the country have not been seriously discussed.

I mean, they've been discussed but not seriously discussed.

I don't see that right now in the immediate future.

But remember, we are very open minded about whatever it takes to preserve the health of the American public will not a consideration but possible one final question to you on this question of several distancing.

Let's take a look at the press conference in the Rose Garden on Friday.

We saw the president's been noted, shaking hands with with many of the executives.

We also saw you there you are touching the microphone and then touching your face.

Just just okay, tell me there were two things there.

John.

I'm working on getting the boss today.

This I may not be successful, but we're working on it.

You know, sometimes there are things you have to do.

If I didn't put the microphone down, it would have seen a microphone in front of my face like that.

So there's some fresh water, but what are you doing to protect yourself?

You know, I'm I'm practicing as much social distancing as I possibly can.

I don't go out.

I just don't go.

I mean, I I have a job that's a 19 hour a day job.

I have no interest in going to the movies to restaurants, but to getting on a plane.

All right.

Dr.

Anthony Fauci.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for the work you're doing.

We appreciate it to be with you.

Hi, everyone.

George Stephanopoulos here.

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