Welcome to CDC's private partner call.

We're so grateful that you've joined us today.

With me is Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director for national center for

immunization and respiratory diseases as well as the senior official for

CDC's COVID-19 response.

>> NANCY MESSONNIER: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today.

I'm happy to take a few minutes to go through an update, and then I

think we have some time for questions.

CDC is responding aggressively to the global outbreak of COVID-19.

This is historic, unprecedented outbreak.

We really haven't seen anything like this since perhaps the pandemic of

influenza in 1918.

Globally, there are somewhere up to 80,000 cases across 169 WHO member

countries, and unfortunately more than 3,000 deaths.

In the United States, there are about 10,000 cases with more cases

really every day, 3,000 new cases since yesterday.

Every state in the United States has been impacted as well as the

District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands and

there have been 150 COVID deaths reported so far.

We should expect these numbers to go up over the next few days as we are

really in an acceleration phase, says but different parts of the country

have been impacted differently. Some states are well into their

outbreaks where other states are really just beginning.

CDC is adapting some of our existing surveillance systems to better

track COVID-19, and you'll be seeing more information on our website.

We do know that the virus is capable of spreading easily and sustainably

from person to person.

And we also know that older people and people with severe chronic

conditions are at higher risk for serious COVID-19 illness, and so we're

asking them to take special precautions, and we're asking everyone to

take special precautions to protect them.

I know that everybody wants to know how long this outbreak will last.

But the truth is, we don't really know.

What we do know is that if we act together and act now, we can bend the

curve of the epidemic so that less people are impacted, and so that our

health system, health sector has more time to catch up.

The duration of the outbreak depends on many factors.

It depends on how well we do at social distancing and travel

restrictions.

It does depend a little bit on what is happening with sustained

transmission in other countries. It is a new virus.

We know some things about it from research here and some things about it

from other countries, and we know about similar viruses, but we have

some details that we don't specifically know yet. For example, the

duration of immunity after infection and all the details about

transmission and clinical severity.

There are upwards of 50 modelers across the United States working on

these kind of questions, and we have a lot of data that we're looking at

to try to make these predictions which I know we all want.

The next point is what you can do.

And we are at a phase where we really need everyone to come together to

respond to this public health threat.

On March 16th, the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the President

issued new guidelines to help protect Americans.

This is called the 15 days to slow the spread.

It lays out guidelines for a nationwide effort to slow the spread, and

it calls for implementation of measures to increase social distancing

between people at all levels of society.

This is a massive proactive preventive response to COVID-19 to slow the

spread and blunt the impact of the disease on the United States.

But in order to do this, we need everyone's help to pitch in, everyone

across all of our communities has a role to play.

We're asking people all across the country to stay home as much as

possible and practice social distancing, which means that we're

decreasing the opportunity to transmit between people.

This includes canceling of postponing gatherings of more than ten people

and closing schools in some areas as determined by local and state

governments.

We've asked about -- we've been asked about guidelines for working

outside, and the guidance remains the same.

Stay 6 feet apart.

That's about two arms' lengths, and cause and sneeze into your arm

because you don't want to expose other people to your coughs and

sneezes.

You need to know that there is no vaccine currently to protect against

COVID-19, and scientists are working as fast as they can.

Even with that, it likely will be a year before we have a vaccine that

we can give to everyday Americans.

And there aren't any approved medications to treat it yet.

There are a whole bunch of treatments being investigated, and the

President announced earlier today with FDA, the rapid speed-up of all of

those treatments, and we hope that we'll have specific treatments soon.

But those things are not yet widely available, and so we need to make

sure that our clinicians have all the information they need to treat

their patients.

We do know, though, that right now the best, most effective thing that

we can do is social distancing.

It actually sounds to some people mundane, that is stay home, but in

fact, there's a bunch of scientific research on this with more than 20

different published articles that talk about what -- how effective

social distancing can be in combination with other measures, and we know

that social distancing works better when it's implemented in concert

with other measures.

We're calling these 15 days a pause, a chance to reset, but it really

won't -- will only be effective if every community across the United

States takes it seriously.

Now, we do have a lot of guidance on our website, and now we're really

working on tools to help with implementing and translating that

guidance.

So we have, for example, guidance for people who have been isolating at

home to help determine when they can discontinue isolation.

That continues to be updated as more information is available.

We're reviewing and updating our travel notices almost daily. There's

currently what's called the level 2 --

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I'll start back with we do have travel notices on our website being

updated almost daily. There's currently what's called the level 2

travel notice for the whole world, which indicates ongoing community

transmission.

And essentially what it means it that we're recommending that older

adults and people of any age with serious chronical medication

conditions should consider postponing travel to most global

destinations.

Domestically, we don't generally issue that kind of guidance, but in

general, we're saying that people at high risk should stay home and that

everyone should be thinking seriously about their travel, especially

globally but even domestically.

Expect more information about this every day.

We also have guidance documents for caring for someone at home.

If you have someone sick in your home with COVID-19, of course, you

should be taking care of them.

But you need to be doing it safely.

We don't want you to get infected, too.

How to disinfect your home if someone's sick and keep workplaces, homes

or commercial establishments safe. We have guidance for child-care

settings, healthcare professional fact sheets, and a new landing page on

our website for those at risk specifically older adults, those with

underlying conditions.

And again, check back every day on our website because you'll see more

information and more tools daily.

Of particular interest to you may be our business guidance and the

expanded guidance covering environmental cleaning and disinfection

recommendations that addresses cleaning recommendations in various

settings, including answering questions we've heard about the bleach

solution proportions for use on surfaces, addressing linens and

clothing, and personal protective equipment.

Another useful tool on our COVID-19 website home page, we now have a map

of the United States.

It shows the number ofs confirmed COVID cases state by state.

You can also click on your state to be taken to the state department

COVID-19 page where you can get more detailed information for your

state.

The intensity of an outbreak may differ according to geographic

location.

The local health departments will have guidance specific to your

communities.

Before we open it up for Q&As, I would like to address some of the

topics in areas many of you have already submitted questions on.

So --

>> Okay.

Let's start by -- let's see, we're getting a whole bunch of questions in

here.

I'm going to try to aggregate them.

Could you speak a little bit about how bad you think the pandemic will

get?

>> NANCY MESSONNIER: So I think this is a really important question. Of

course, we all want to know how bad this is going to get and how long

it's going to last.

Right now we are in an acceleration phase. That is, we've seen 3,000

new cases since yesterday.

We're on the upward part of a curve, and we should expect more

acceleration over the next couple days.

That's why it's so important that we all act now and act together to

bend that curve so that we can moderate the impact.

What that means is lowering the curve so that we have less cases every

day and hopefully less cases total, but also by having less cases every

day, we really can help the health sector catch up.

How long is it going to last? I don't know for sure, but I think we

should expect to see at least some places have impact for this disease

through the summer.

>> Great. Thank you.

Okay.

A question about if someone is -- tests positive, recovers, and then

is -- is it possible to become reinfected again?

>> NANCY MESSONNIER: Yeah.

This is a great question that we've been asked a lot.

This is a new disease. It's only been discovered since beginning of the

year.

And so there's some information that we don't have yet.

In general, for most respiratory infections, getting infected leads to

immunity, and that immunity protects you against either the whole

disease or at least having serious disease, so we're hoping certainly

that that's true for COVID-19, but this is an area where there's lots of

research, and I expect there to be more information coming.

So we don't know for sure yet.

We certainly hope so.

>> Thanks. Okay. Many, many questions from our partners about closures

such as why child-care centers and schools are closing, why some prisons

are implementing restrictions while others are not.

Is there any general advice you can give on closures?

>> NANCY MESSONNIER: So closure decisions are made at a state and local

level.

CDC does provide guidance, but ultimately the decision to close is made

at the state and local health department level, and for your businesses,

the decision should be made in conjunction with state and local health

departments.

I talk about the acceleration of bend the curve, and that is true

nationally, but this really does look differently in some communities

compared to others. Some communities are already seeing a whole lot of

disease, and some communities are seeing very little.

And that may explain why guidance differs in different places.

But in general, we are asking everybody across the country, even in

places that haven't yet seen a lot of disease, to take this seriously

and act now.

I know it's disruptive. It's certainly disruptive for my family. It's

certainly disruptive for my colleagues here at CDC as we all figure out

how to cope.

But working together is the best way for us to impact this disease right

now.

>> Thank you. Okay.

We're receiving a lot of questions from individuals unsure about

continuing their regular doctor and dental appointments.

What advice do you have for them?

>> NANCY MESSONNIER: Yeah. It's really important right now that we take

into account how much work our healthcare sector needs to do to take

care of patients with COVID-19, to be able to make sure that those

patients are taken care of, a lot of doctors' offices and a lot of

communities are recommending that individuals postpone their regular

doctor and dentist appointments.