From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Good evening. I am ian bremmer, filling in for charlie rose, who is on assignment. Demonstrators are protesting what they see as chinas attempts to strangle democracy in hong kong. They were initially met by a harsh police crackdown. The standoff continues as student leaders call for the resignation of hong kong chief executive c. Y. Leung. Joining me from washington is jon huntsman. He served as u. S. Ambassador to china from 2009 to 2011, and his former candidate to the republican president ial nomination in 2012. Good to be with you. Lets start by telling us where we are right now in this dispute. How dangerous is it, and how does it play out . On the ground, we clearly have a standoff. That is likely to last some time, which likely accommodates the needs of both sides. It accommodates the needs of beijing because they cannot be seen as cracking down or doing anything drastic anytime soon, and it is a combination of the demonstrators and freedom seekers in hong kong. Hong kong is a freewheeling place, and this is the way they do business. So i suspect the shortterm prognosis is they will likely remain as they are. Tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 people in the financial district of hong kong. And the dynamic of beijing will be interesting. What i think it is reflective of is xi jinpings personalized leadership style, which is far different than anyone we have seen since Deng Xiaoping. Whatever happens out of beijing, the choices he makes will be reflective of him and his leadership style as opposed to any kind of collective approach to problemsolving we saw for example under the term of jiang zemin or hu jintao. They did not have the personalized approach nor the Political Power Base that xi jinping has, so they had to brokerdeals within the Standing Committee of the politburo, particularly relating to hong kong. Remembering the issues that played out, 2003 specifically, they were fairly successful in their ability to settle things out. But this is a different player, xi jinping, and it is playing out in a different dynamic given the high politics in beijing driven by the whole anticorruption program. Has he made a mistake . Has he overplayed his hand . You were in hong kong right after they put out the white paper that changed the nature of suffrage in the upcoming election. It is clearly on him to a degree. Did he go too far . We will know that in the days and weeks ahead. How he responds to this will say everything about how he chooses to deal with hong kong Going Forward. Suffice it to say, hong kong, as opposed to the one country to Systems Approach xiaoping so artfully developed with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and 1990s, it is looking more like one country as opposed to two systems. But what is inside xi jinpings head as this plays out . Remember, xi jinping has a very different relationship with hong kong than his predecessors. He was the Party Secretary running shanghai not long ago. A Major Economic competitor. So he saw hong kong as a rival full of troublemakers and hooligans for the most part. Dig deeper, and xi jinpings father, as the story goes, was responsible for hong kong under mao zedong, and thats when british and western powers were running fairly subversive operations out of hong kong into the mainland. There was indeed a black and behind all things in hong kong back in those days as seen by beijing. So i suspect xi jinping, based upon his early formative years, still probably sees hong kong as full of some western troublemakers who are ultimately behind a lot of this. In 1997, hong kong was 16 of chinas gdp. It is tiny now. Are these steps he is less concerned about because it doesnt matter as much to chinas future . You have the domestic component in china, and then the regional component, certainly the global component. They are all important. But secs it during 1997, during the handover, hong kong was the goose laying the golden eggs for china. Today, many leaders see hong kong just as another big chinese city with none of the unique economic characteristics that made it so different some years ago. There has traditionally been a rivalry between shanghai and hong kong. Rivalry in attracting investment, in terms of locating corporate headquarters. The advancement of economic development. Hong kong has always maintained its connection to the bulwark of rule of law, which created the economic and lyrical uniqueness over the last 150 years. But increasingly it is seen as just another big city in china. That may be the way in which decisionmakers proceed as they view options Going Forward. And that is the way xi jinping sees it. But is that the way the Chinese People see it . Shanghai has gotten a lot wealthier. You hear people saying hong kong is a bunch of spoiled children who dont know how good they have it, that they are complaining. But now a lot of mainland chinese themselves are wealthy, have their own aspirations. Is it possible that xi is out of touch with a fair amount of his population on this issue . I think xi is for the most part in touch. He gets around. He has been a populist leader for the most part. I have to tell you, he is fairly popular and well thought of domestically, so if ever there was a chinese leader who actually had some leverage among his own population to work out some sort of approach in settling down hong kong, he would certainly be a leader to be able to do that. He has fully consolidated power over his last two years of leadership. He has a direct shot to the 19th Party Congress in about three years, and then he will be around another five years after that. Here is another competition factor about the timing of this whole thing. We have elections and the whole reform discussion in 2017, and if this universal suffrage model is not clearly defined beyond what we understand it to be today, then the next opening is five years later, which takes us to 2022. What is playing out in 2022 in beijing . The 20th Party Congress, and the real change of leadership where xi jinping will be stepping down and somebody else will be stepping into the primary role. We all know that during the leadership transitions, nothing gets done. There is a hypercautious environment that people step into, and if the universal suffrage rules of the road cannot be defined fairly soon, i think we are in a long waiting game to create more in the way of citizen turnout, both in hong kong, the anxiety associated with a lack of understanding with respect to the original commitment, and then you halve the whole taiwan dimension, which is a very important part of the story, very little reported on. You have elections there in 2016. Municipal elections next year, and president ial elections in 2014. How this plays out will have enormous and locations for taiwan. You dont see something is among the mainland chinese population for the occupy Hong Kong Movement as it stands . You will certainly have pockets of those who are sympathetic, particularly among young people. But more recently there has been a fairly deep wave of nationalism throughout china. Xi jinping has consolidated power, solidified himself as the singularly or in the tradition of mao zedong. But you will have pockets of the population, and i will say increasingly on the young people, who see the world through similar terms, who would be more sympathetic to what is happening in hong kong. The more this is left to chance without definition put around it, you will probably have more in the way of sympathizers. Does that give xi jinping more flexibility if he acts decisively one way or the other now . If he decides to crack down or if he decides there will be some form of compromise, may be forcing the chief minister to step down . He doesnt have a lot of margin for error here. One, they have a chief executive in hong kong in mr. Leung who is not popular, who is seen as being in the hip pocket of beijing. He is not widely liked and respected by the people of hong kong. So to have him as the intermediary is negotiating with one hand tied behind your back. Beyond that, the high politics playing out in china for xi jinping make it so that he does not have margin for error, so they have this Anticorruption Campaign playing out and he is making a lot of enemies. He takes down some of these fairly senior leaders, calling it taking out tigers and flies. The tigers he is taking out, like one person who was at one point the most powerful man in china responsible for the security apparatus, and political leaders, they have their own political networks, and you Better Believe they will run for xi jinping at every opening. If xi makes a bad call, that could escalate in terms of antixi sentiment among the political elite in china quickly. He knows that, and he will be careful. Will that make him more reluctant if things get bad to call on the pla . At the end of the day, does he not want to be beholden to that group for favors . Calling the pla to take action would be disastrous. Disastrous for the public image of china, which i know down deep they care about very much. It would be disastrous for some members of the party who are more reform minded. It would be a disaster in terms of the very survival and wellbeing economically of hong kong. Increasingly, even as this plays out with just tear gas and rubber bullets, corporations will begin to vote with their feet. At least what im hearing, people reconsidering hong kong as a regional headquarters, already packing up bags and move into places like singapore. This could be very real. The Worst Nightmare scenario for xi jinping is to see capital flight out of hong kong and china. That they cannot afford to see happen, which i would put as being just as painful as any of the applications that might result from any kind of harsh crackdown. He is very constrained in this environment. From the hong kong reformist perspective, we have demands from the leadership such as it is in the occupy Central Movement that if c. Y. Leung does not step down by the end of the day tomorrow, they will occupy government buildings. Do you believe xi jinping can stand aside and not require a harsh crackdown if they follow through on that . I suspect he can let it play out to a certain extent, but at some point they will have to be compromise. They will have to be some brokered settlement somewhere between a one person, one vote, which is ultimately what everyone thought would be the outcome, and one committee, when outcome, which is kind of what came out in june. They changed the rules fundamentally. So somebody will have to open up the negotiation with the principal players in hong kong and strike some sort of compromise. I dont know yet what that will be, but it will have to be something along the lines of how you broaden the candidates allowed to stand up for a vote. You allow candidates if they reach a certain number of signatures . Will you take the 1200 delegates responsible for vetting a handful of candidates . In the white paper, it came out that the criteria for running, are you patriotic and do you love china . That is the language that was used. Ultimately beijing really does have the upper hand in terms of choosing that slate of candidates. The key is how you allow more fresh air in, more diverse voices. That is not easy to do, but i suspect that is the only choice ahead other than some sort of harsh crackdown, which would be a disastrous thing for china, the region, and the global economy. One of the things that has bolstered xis charisma in china has been this talk of the chinese dream, very different than the american dream. Candor be one chinese dream that encompasses the aspirations of hong kong . The beauty of the chinese dream, which is on billboards plastered all over the country, is you can make the chinese dream whatever you want. Whatever you aspire to, that can be part of the chinese dream. Its a little like the old wild west american frontier, where you can make whatever life you want. Get out and dream big and work hard, and you can go places. So if you are sitting in hong kong, that your dream might be a little dashed today in terms of universal suffrage, im sure they are still keeping the dream alive that is some point they will be recognition that hong kong is a very special place and will benefit enormously by maintaining individual characteristics. That you think, buy some time right now, show some flexibility, may be a technocratic solution. Xi jinping might be a little smarter in this now than a lot of observers think . He cannot afford to make a bad decision. Given how the Anticorruption Campaign is playing out, given the long knives that lie in wait for him, given the economic importance even today of hong kong and how the global marketplace will perceive the choices that he will make all of that registers loud and clear, i have no doubt about it, in beijing. He will have to thread the needle, and it will not be an easy thing to do. But the stakes for him politically are extremely high. Take it internationally for a second. You talked about how u. S. Corporations and others are rethinking about if hong kong is a place they want to be longterm. We also see american corporations with concerns about mainland china, the report they just came out. Is china becoming so big at this point, so different, that you expect to see more conflict and confrontation with the United States . Anytime you have a trading relationship that exceeds 500 billion a year, going on 1 trillion a year, which will make it the largest economic relationship the world has ever known, you will have tricky issues. Trade disputes. Some of them are going to look downright unresolvable, and they are going to carry with them a lot of emotion and passion. For heaven sake, we had a longstanding relationship with the eu, but i remember difficult cases with respect to airbus subsidies not so long ago that became pretty difficult. As the relationship with china grows and increases in size and complexity, clearly we will have more trade complaints and disputes. I think that is given. But important in all of this is how xi jinping chooses to steer his reform package Going Forward, which we will know a lot more about in the next week or two with the fourth plenum, which will build on the third plenum of last november, which really did spell out the principles of fiscal and financial reform, how to deal with things like urbanization, the hundreds of millions of people moving from the central part of the country into the city centers, how you deal with things like reform of the state owned enterprises, of which there are 110 key companies, five megacompanies, they must be reformed. So the answer to a lot of this, the economic relationship with not only the u. S. , but the rest of the world, is really tied up in these reform measures. And if i were a gambling person, which i am, i guess, i would say we have another two or three years before the 19th Party Congress where xi jinping will continue consolidating his power base, which is already substantial. And between the 19th Party Congress and 2022, the 20th Party Congress, i suspect he will be fulltime focused on the economic reforms, many of which are downright audacious, and aspirational. I suspect we will look back seven or eight years down the road and see xi jinping had an impact on china with respect to economic reform much like Deng Xiaoping did in the late 1980s when he swung open the doors to the United States for investment. If we look at xi jinping so far, Economic Transformation but also very much consolidation of power. Do you view what we have seen in hong kong as fundamentally about the latter, and do you believe at the end of the day that hes able to back away from it . Yeah, so this is a little taste of what lies ahead over the next 10, 20, 30 years in other traditional chinese cities. Hong kong being a special autonomous region, it is a little different in terms of its more recent history and a lot of influences. But with a new generation of emerging in china, accessing the outside world, 200,000 to 300,000 students studying in the United States, hundreds of thousands in other western countries, the pool toward greater openness, transparency, and fundamental democratic principles will grow more intense. So xi jinping is probably thinking as he analyzes hong kong, how i address and answer hong kong will in large measure probably have some connection with how i address similar circumstances in the next 10 years of his leadership. The way he addressed it not only on the International Stage but also domestically, you look at some of the statements made by Chinese State media sound more hardline in terms of calling for the Police Forces to respond very quickly and the hong kong population to support it. Certainly if you are in china today, you are getting a very specific and limited view of what is happening on the ground in hong kong. Is that a mistake . Does he need to back away from that if compromise is where we need to go . Compromise will have to be part of it. But you have to get back to his leadership model. He established himself not as a Group Participant with the Standing Committee, whereby you arrive at a conclusion after ruminating on options and compromising and giving and taking, which is traditionally the chinese leadership model at least under the last two leaders. He has singularly positioned himself in the model of mao and Deng Xiaoping. This is xi jinping. He is the singular player in all of this. He will have to figure out where to compromise, and how to deal with difficult and thorny issues. He is on the leading edge of what will clearly be a lot more. You have to remember, the story of hong kong is not just limited to hong kong and the nonchinese countries in the asiapacific region. But in every major hotel, every major bookstore, and drugstore where they have newspapers, increasingly you have western newspapers available. They tried to gazette them from time to time. Getting access to the outside world is not so difficult in china. You need a little work to jump the great firewall, but that is not so hard. Jon huntsman, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you, ian. We continue coverage of the unrest in hong kong. Michael is the Senior Vice President of the center for strategic and international studies. You heard some of my conversation with jon huntsman. Let me ask you, do you find flexibility . I think jon huntsman laid out how xi jinping could think about hong kong, what is at stake. I believe we should aim for that kind of flexibility and compromise. I am not sure we will get it though. Xi clearly is the decision maker, compounding power on himself in ways we have not seen in some time in china. But if you look at the cases parallel to this, the unrest in xinjiang, the tibetans, south china confrontations with the philippines and vietnam and East China Sea with japan, have china cracks down on International Ngos and civil society, the pattern is xi does not back down. Maybe it is temporary because he has an ambitious reform agenda, but it may also be a reflection of what some chinese think, that he talks like deng but hits like mao. So im not convinced he will exhibit flexibility, but we should try to explore that and push the logic jon huntsman described. Since the crisis started in hong kong, is there reason to believe he has any ability to show flexibility . I think that xi jinping approach this like a marxist. He studies dialectic materialism, the forces of history, which argue that material factors, i. E. Wealth creation, trump everything else. So the chinese calculus with everything, especially hong kong, is that if we make you rich you will be happy, and that is the end of it. It is a turning point in how the leadership looks at hong kong. Its clear money cant buy you love, that development in hong kong, even the fear of economic damage in hong kong, is not enough to deter these protesters from demanding what they were promised in 2007, which is universal suffrage. This is a new world, i suspect. It betrays the logic of chinese foreignpolicy that xi has championed. At the same time, this is not t. It betrays the logic of chinese foreignpolicy that xi has championed. At the same time, this is not like 2003 when there were protests, large protests against chinas antisubversion law. In that case, the executive in hong kong backed off. He compromised. In this case, it is a white paper at a beijing, so much harder to find a facesaving compromise, because now it is all on xi jinping himself. There is no middle man who made the declaration who can now take the hit as in 2003 and back away and preserve face for beijing. The final point on this, the reason why i think this is not going to go away, is the protesters are extremely well organized and have this app called firechat which is bluetooth technology, largely impervious to the great firewall on the internet, and they are determined. What do you think the response needs to be from the United States now, and where does it need to go Going Forward . I thought the white house statement was good. It was very much on point. It took a little while, but what they put out yesterday and today reconfirmed our support for universal suffrage in hong kong and our support for the aspirations of the people protesting. The white house did not say, we support exactly their demands, because there is a large group and some division, but i thought that was the right thing to say. Going forward, we are going to have to lock arms with other democracies around the world and not allow defections. The british were a bit slow to come around on this one. This will take some lateral diplomacy with other gseven countries and so forth, and some effective diplomacy with beijing, to make it clear we are trying to find a safe routes that gives us pass this but response to the legitimate aspirations of the people protesting. Im sure you saw one of the initial responses from the chinese government, mentioning foreign influence in helping to promote instability in hong kong. Of course, there are lots of americans who would like to see these students succeed, but do you think the United States government has any role in actively trying to assist we have to be careful, to be honest. This is not the green revolution. This is not the middle east. This is an open society with access to technology and social media, and we have to be careful not to be appearing to foment or intervene, and i think our consul general in hong kong is probably the strongest china hand we had in the state department. Hes keeping a fairly low profile, letting policy come out of washington and handling it exactly right. We cannot be seen as fomenting revolutions. As china is getting larger, given all the internal challenges, are the United States and china getting further apart . On one hand we are becoming much more interdependent. There are many more Chinese Students here, many more American Students there. We have common interests dealing with problems like north korea. On the other hand, increasingly beijing is doing the relationship as zerosum. The Obama Administration is in part to blame because they have had a very inconsistent articulation of what our strategy is with china. In 2009, the president said we will respect core interests. China will respect ours. We will respect theres. Which sounded like we were splitting the difference with china after the financial crisis. Very unpopular with our allies. In 2010 and 2011 we came swinging back with the socalled pivot, and the pentagons rebalancing strategy, which looked like we were containing china. In the second term, secretary kerry and others emphasized xi jinpings proposal for a new model of great power relations, which again sounds like the u. S. And china are managing asia at the expense of our allies. Is china our partner, our adversary . Competition question. The position of the administration has sort of confused it, swinging back and forth. The reality is we want cooperation with china, but we will not tolerate efforts to reorder asia and we will stand by our allies and our principles, particularly our democratic principles. It is pretty basic, that we have not been consistent. As a result, trust between chinese leadership and the white house is probably the lowest it has been since nixon. That makes this a tough environment to work in, for so far the Administration Policies on hong kong look right to me. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I am dr. Jon lapook, a i am dr. Jon lapook, a professor of medicine at nyu medical center. Im filling in for charlie rose tonight, on assignment. Yesterday the first ebola case diagnosed in the United States was confirmed in dallas. The centers for Disease Control and prevention confirmed the man flew to the u. S. From liberia. He is in isolation at texas health presbyterian. Meanwhile the epidemic continues to grow rapidly in west africa. As of now there have been more than 7100 cases across liberia, sierra leone, and ginny. More than 3300 people have died. With me in new york now, bryan walsh, a Senior Writer for Time Magazine and laurie garrett, a senior fellow for Global Health at the council for global relations. William schaffner is a former president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for coming. Bill, why dont you just assume everyone knows nothing, give us a primer on ebola. What is it . This is a virus that lives in the wild, largely among fruit bats, and does so successfully and only occasionally gets out into human populations. Starting in 1976, it has caused a series of outbreaks largely in the congo. Usually in rural villages. The villagers interacted with animals and products of the fruit bats, became infected themselves, and those outbreaks were relatively quickly contained. It was a serious virus, because when it got into people it had high fatality rates, sometimes as high as 90 . Sometimes lower. Now, more recently it has occurred in west africa, many thousands of miles distant, heretofore unknown to the medical community there, and it has spread very rapidly. It is an illness that when you get it is characterized by fever, feeling terribly sick, muscle cramps, loss of appetite, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, sometimes a rash, and if you have a fatal case you become comatose and slip away over time. The current outbreak seems to have gotten out of rural areas and into bigger cities, monrovia, and that is where the mischief has occurred. Is that fair to say . It is fair to say. It is important to note that this virus is not easy to transmit from one person to another. First of all, only sick people become contagious for others, and then it is their bodily fluids. You have to have contact with their bodily fluids in order to effect transmission. It spreads so readily in the three west african countries because the medical care system was very modest, shall we say, not knowledged of the disease. People moved around a lot, so that enhanced the spread. And they were certain social and cultural practices that contributed to the. For example, the burial practices are such that the body is paid respect by cleaning it thoroughly. There is a lot of contact with the bodily fluids. So family members caring for ill people and for the dead often were paradoxically the very victims and the next generation of transmission. And so the epidemic rolled on. That is a good point to bring it here to bryan walsh. You had a lot of thinking about what is going on in africa. We heard about 75 of the people infected were caregivers, most of them women. What has been your thinking about what is going on . We have seen an enhanced response. President obama talked about it. A major topic of the u. N. General assembly. This is not something getting under control, really, in sera lyons and ginny and liberia. It is very difficult. These are countries where the Healthcare Systems were already badly damaged, coming at a civil wars, now trying to deal with this disease. On one hand we know how to control it, but that is a lot harder to do when you are talking about dozens of new cases, difficult conditions, having to use very challenging personal Protection Equipment to make sure that the doctors dont get the disease. So this is something that is not going to end anytime soon. I saw a video from sierra leone shown to me by dan kelly, a doctor who went there. In it, there was a woman carrying a baby, and she was asked about fear. Are you afraid the doctors will inject you with ebola . She said, you hear a lot of things, you dont know what to believe. That was the response early on, doubts if it was. Real. There was a lot of fear. We have to think about, you would not be getting doctors people would only show up when somebody died. We had a reporter in monrovia following the body retrieval forces. They were receiving a lot of public anger. When they were sick people you did not show up. We cannot carry out the Funeral Rites we are used to. It is challenging in any society to mount this kind of response. Laurie garrett, by midjune this was already the biggest outbreak of ebola in history. Why did it take seemingly two americans getting infected in july for the world to take note . I dont think that did it. I think it was not until the end of august that the world took notice. The american case is made donald trump worried he might get ebola, but that had nothing to do with the mobilization of our response. I think you have setbacks. First of all, this was misdiagnosed as cholera in the very early phases in december, in a remote rainforest area of guinea, similar to the relationship with bats. This is a triangulate area where the three countries share a piece of the rain forest, so very quickly it had the potential to cross borders. That is the first feature that is unique, in that in the 20 prior outbreaks we never had crossborder transmission. The first problem, three countries had to have shared response, three countries had to coordinate. None of that happened. Why not . Why would they . They have been locked in civil war. They hate each other. They had huge animosities. Guinea housed militia that cut off the arms and legs of kids across the border in liberia. Everybody over 10 years old in these cultures remembers and knows who they hate and fear. This doesnt go away any faster than our civil war dissipated. Theres still people who get mad at me if i say faster than grant took richmond. It was diagnosed as cholera because the major presentation was diarrhea. You go to march before you get correct diagnosis. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization was beleaguered, a 1. 2 billion budget deficit. The most recent World Health Assembly voted to slash the Infectious Disease budget to 140 million a year. You try battling an epidemic with that much money and 32 staffers. They are beleaguered, and the attention was grabbed by another phenomenon, middle east respiratory syndrome in saudi arabia. There was huge Political Tension around that. They already went through one hajj worried the programs would all get mers. They was controversy on the saudi front. They fired the minister o health in saudi arabia. All this was going on and distracting w. H. O. Meanwhile, the cdc was distracted because infections occurred inside cdc facilities and longlost smallpox samples were found stored at nih and so on. Numbers of congress were calling for the firing of the director. They ordered the special pathogens facility shutdown pending congressional investigation. Almost everyone who would be an ebola specialist was bogged down. And in july all of europe goes on vacation for six weeks. All the way to august, by then we have seen this grow to be not only unprecedented in terms of three countries, but unprecedented as it becomes an organized epidemic. You are going into urbanized slum areas were not only is there historic distrust, but current distrust. Nobody likes the government, they dont like the cops. Msf, doctors without borders, is the only major responders. Showing up in space suits. People see them coming, saying we want your child, we will remove your child bill, you know what happened. A man came from liberia on a plane, perfectly fine, but when he came to the states he developed symptoms on the 24th, went to a hospital in dallas on the 26th, with symptoms, and something got lost in the sauce there, because he was sent home and spent a few more days at home before he got really sick and was brought by ambulance. When you hear this, what you thinking . I am surprised and distressed. We need to obviously review the circumstances, because all of us can learn lessons. Hospitals across the country, my own included, have been reviewing Infection Control policies and procedures, and we have asked all providers to ask questions when they see fever. Have you been outside the United States, and if so, where . One of my colleagues wondered what it is this patient actually said to the nurse. No disparagement, just making an observation. If the patients just said im from liberia, i have to wonder, did the nurse know where liberia was . We have a special vulnerability in the United States. Our friends across the atlantic dont share this. 13 of our population has no Health Care Insurance at all. We have millions more underinsured, with such high copays that they avoid health care. We have a builtin Health Treatment avoidance system in the country, so most americans in lowinsurance or noinsurance will just tough out a fever. They cannot afford to go. The second problem, when they do go it will be a Public Hospital emergency room where they will spend 12 hours waiting to see a doctor, and during that time, what we know about ebola, one thing we know is that all 21 epidemics have exploded in hospitals. They are spread within a medical facility. People are concerned about it. What are you hearing in terms of the concern of the people who you work with . Certainly as soon as you have one case coming to the United States it sets off alarm bells. One case in the United States versus thousands of cases in west africa i feel there is a decent job of communication. The cdc was good making it clear that it did not pose a risk to you individually, the average american. They have no doubt it will be under control. What lori is saying, i would be concerned if it were a different virus, one more communicable, one more dangerous than ebola, whether we might see, just like a lot of hospital acquired infections. The cdc has it under control. We might see another one, another case come out of this one, the first time it spread in the u. S. This is still an important case. People should not worry too much, but that doesnt mean the Health System is in any way ready for what would be a much bigger challenge. We have to grow up and face and brutal realities. As bryan said, we are still on the ascendance in this horrible epidemic in west africa, and the numbers if you do the basic math are absolutely staggering. , what is coming, what already is. The officially reported numbers are almost irrelevant. They give you a vague barometer of, scale, but as the cdc said last week, the numbers are off by an order of magnitude of at least 2. 5. I think the numbers are off by three, actually especially in sierra leone. Why . If most of the people are no coming into the Health Systemt, there is no way to count them. If most people die in their village without being counted or noted, no way we have the death toll accurate. What do the numbers really look like . If you do the math, it is clear we already have close to 20,000 cases in the three countries. Guineas epidemic seems to have receded for the time being. Now lets go forward. It is doubling every 15 to 21 days. So play conservative and go to 21 days. 20,000 now, meaning by midoctober we will be up to 40,000, by sometime at the end, 80,000. By christmas, 400,000. If you look at percentage of death that has been grossly undercounted. While you may have intake, you dont know what happens when a person goes back to their village. Right now the death full looks to be around 50 , but a new publication by the british medical journal puts the real figure at 70 . I ask you, try as an american to put in your head, 400,000 infected, 70 die. So america, wake up. This is not only an isolated individual who will end up in dallas, texas. We are in a globalized world, and the risk is shared. We only have a few minutes left. Is it possible for us to have Health Care Aid to west africa in such a way that it leaves them with a Health Care System that has been built for the first time and can do them good in the future . You have a quantum increase in the resources and manpower. The rate of growth is hard to imagine. It is like trying to catch up with a runner. You increase the speed, but the runner gets twice as fast every 21 days. You think you are putting up more and more, but you are falling further behind. That is where we are right now. It would be great to leave behind a system as a legacy able to deal with other diseases and conditions and leave the more prepared for the next outbreak, but we are not even close with to dealing with this one. How do we go to work speed warp speed . We have not dealt with this like a major disaster. Think of Something Like katrina. They were people lining up. You could text to the red cross and donate money. This is, people do not feel so much a desire to help as fear. When we have a case like this, i worried those feelings will intensify. Thank you, laurie garrett, bryan walsh, dr. William schaffner. I thank you for joining me. Live from pier three in san francisco, welcome to bloomberg west where we cover innovation, technology, and the future of business. He will put off his retirement. He was just given a twoyear contract extension which would keep them at the top of disney until june, 2018. We look into what this means for disneys business as well as their plan to groom a successor. The muchhyped ipo has come crashing back to earth, shares fell about 12 after opening at the top