Distribute a vaccine. This is 30 minutes. All yours. All mine . Great. Good afternoon. And thank you, secretary azar, for joining us today at cdc headquarters. It is a privilege to have you with us and we appreciate your leadership throughout this unprecedented response. Covid19 is the most significant Public Health challenge our country has faced in more than a century. And the pandemic is not over. And the pandemic is not over. Earlier this week, covid virus cases reached over 40 million globally. Here in the United States, we are approaching a critical phase. In a few moments, dr. Jay butler, cdc director for Infectious Disease and the former Incident Manager of the cdcs covid19 response will provide you a brief update on our current situation. I know it has been a difficult year for americans, but we are going to come through this on the other side. I am also optimistic that we will have a limited supply of one or more covid Vaccines Available for distribution before the end of thi
Good afternoon. And thank you, secretary azar, for joining us today at cdc headquarters. It is a privilege to have you with us and we appreciate your leadership throughout this unprecedented response. Covid19 is the most significant Public Health challenge our country has faced in more than a century. And the pandemic is not over. Earlier this week, covid virus cases reached over 40 million globally. Here in the United States, we are approaching a critical phase. In a few moments, dr. Jay butler, cdc director for Infectious Disease and the former Incident Manager of the cdcs covid19 response will provide you a brief update on our current situation. I know it has been a difficult year for americans, but we are going to come through this on the other side. I am also optimistic that we will have a limited supply of one or more covid Vaccines Available for distribution before the end of this year, but were not quite there yet. That is why it is so important that all of us remain diligent i
Dr. Fauci was unable to join us in person but wanted to share a message with us. Dr. Fauci i am pleased to address this committee from the conference of mayors on this extremely important topic, covid19. I am going to give you a brief overview on talk about the research response. You all know the history. Ago, but ite years was just a few months ago that we had thrust upon us this new virus that came out of china, after, almost certainly, jumping species from an animal, likely a bat, to humans, leading to end up raked that was first recognized leading to an outbreak that was first recognized that they market in wuhan, china. Januaryese reported on 9, when the information went up on a database for us to look at. I will get back to that. The disease is referred to covid19, for coronavirus disease 19. The virus causes sars coronavirus 2, because of its relationship to the 2002 sars coronavirus. These things happened because of the identification of what was going on in china and elsewhere
Experiencing at any one time, its different for your peers and you need the very best information, the best guidance you can get but you need the ability to understand your communities, your stakeholders, hospital capacity, Public Health capacity to make the very best decisions for your communities. Cdc has been on it since the beginning but we want to be a resource to you, your Public Health, staff and the city and the state Public Health and government and leadership as well but you, as mayors are playing an incredibly Important Role in amplifying the collective voices on major issues. As you know, your realities have really changed, for many of you since january and more of you since march when the pandemic really got here in the u. S. We know youre on the front lines, implementing the process of reopening our nation, city by city, for some of you it might be neighborhood by neighborhood and we know you are taking priority in this to do things in the manner best for your local area.
What i meant by its not working is were dealing with Community Spread as a substantial number of people getting infected do not know theyre infected. Theyre not symptomatic. Theyre asymptomatic individuals. The classic paradigm of identification and Contact Tracing is very difficult to make that work under those circumstances. You superimpose upon that the fact that even with identification, isolation and contact trace, often the dots are not connected. If you get on the phone and talk to people who are in some of these communityus find that a lot of it is done by phone. When its done by phone maybe half the people dont want to talk to one who they think is a government representative. If you live in a community thats mostly brown or black youre in a different situation that maybe 70 of them dont really want to talk to you. You can identify a contact but you dont isolate them because you dont have the facility to isolate them. That is whats not working. So what were going to do, and we