Themselves as the president prepares to address the nation. If we get rid of the problem quickly and everything solves itself. We dont need stimulus. All that, and what we learned when Bernie Sanders addressed the media today when all in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. Were in the midst of a Global Pandemic. That the been evident for weeks but today the World Health Organization officially declared coronavirus as a pandemic. Because of the widespread scale of the outbreak. The w. H. O. Has been working on this virus from the beginning when it first broke out in wuhan, china. They saw how it took down an entire citys Health Care System and resulted in over 3,000 deaths in china. W. H. O. Has been warning about coronavirus for months but has been reluctant to make the pandemic decoration for fears of inciting panic, until today when they decided that now is the time. W. H. O. Has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and were deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction. Alarming levels of inaction. Message there similar to that of dr. Anthony fauchi who ran the institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1964 and played a major role in the aids crisis and today testified and forthright and he was honest about what is coming at us right now unlike the president. Is the worst yet to come, dr. Fauchi . Yes, it is. Is there any chance well have a vaccine in a few months . No, i made myself clear in my statement. This is a really serious problem we have to take seriously. People say well, the flu does this, the flu does that. The flu has a mortality of 0. 1 . This has a mortality of ten times that. We would hope as we get to warmer weather it would go down, but we cant proceed under that assumption. Weve got to assume that its going to get worse and worse and worse. Dr. Fauchis testimony today was almost literally the exact opposite of what President Trump and members of his administration have been telling us for weeks and weeks and weeks. We finally got to hear a candid version of the truth from an expert unedited. Here is where things stand right now. This shows the growth of coronavirus cases outside of china. Right now there are nearly 45,000 confirmed cases in the world outside of china where the outbreak appears to be under control. This is what the u. S. Curve looks like almost identical, right . Looks like the global curve we saw. In the u. S. , four weeks ago we had 15 cases. Just over a week ago we had 100 cases. Today we have over 1200 cases. That number probably does not even capture the reality because our Testing Capacity is not actually measuring the scope of the problem. What is clear is we are racing up this curve at an almost similar rate to the countries that have gone before us. For instance, italy. Italy right now is in the midst of a full blown Public Health crisis. The country is completely on lockdown. Today a new measure announced. Italy announced it will stop almost all commercial activity aside from supermarkets and pharmacies. Think about that for a second. Everything closed except for drugstores and food. They also announced today they now have over 12,000 cases and the total deaths in the country increased, listen to this, have increased over 30 in just 24 hours. From 631 to 827. 30 increase in fatalities in one day. This chart shows the rapid growth of cases in italy. Does that look familiar . It should. You can also see how the u. S. Is right now following almost the exact same trajectory just a week behind. Now many, if not most of those deaths in italy are likely a direct result of what weve already seen with this virus in wuhan, china. The virus is over running the Health Care System capacity. Anywhere in the world at any given time in any given city, there is a fixed amount of doctors, icus, beds, ventilators. The Systemic Risk the virus poses to everyone around the world right now, including in the u. S. , is what is happening now in italy. Doctors in that country are intubating patients in hallways. Massive numbers of Health Care Workers are infected. Atlanta has a remarkable document that recommends doctors allocate stretched resources to patients with the highest chance of recovery. Italian doctors are being forced to decide who to save and let die. Trumps Homeland Security advisor told nbc news were ten days away from the hospitals getting creamed. We are now nine days away. That is where were headed right now in this country. The only thing we can do at this point as citizens, as Civil Society because the testing has been screwed up inexcusably by the federal government is to take dramatic steps collectively to socially distance ourselves. To try and flatten the curve of this epidemic and slow the transmission of the virus in order to stop a run on our hospitals, to protect the vulnerable populations. Thats older people, people with serious chronic medical conditions, like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes. We all have people that are vulnerable to this and the clear steps to take are cancelling large scale events and reducing travel, reducing going out and going to restaurants or events. We need to take this all deadly seriously. You can go read the warnings from italians who said we did not take this seriously enough and now were in it. Thats their message to us. That message however is not being adequately communicated at all by the most powerful person in the country. Someone we will be hearing from later tonight, a man that insist propagating disinformation and meeting with ceos to discuss an economic problem but the right message is being communicated by people in the administration and former Trump Administration officials like tom bosser and scott by governors Like Washington jay inslee who today announced they are shutting down events over 250 people. The reality is we have to take dramatic steps and we are only now at this late hour starting to see those steps in action. From more on where we stand now, im joined by dr. Emanuel. Former Obama White HouseHealth Policy adviser. And dr. Peter hotez, dean of the National School of tropical medicine at Baylor College of medicine. Dr. Manuel, let me start with you. Where do you see us now and are we doing enough in terms of large scale social disruption and changes to slow the transmission of this epidemic . So first of all, ive been saying for several weeks now that its going to get worse before it gets better. Parsely, its going to get worse because we have testing thats just going to show us how prevalent the illness is. Its also getting worse because we know we have more Community Acquired infections. As i mentioned to someone today, you know, one week ago we were not even talking about new rochelle and now its a lockdown, and if we focus on new rochelle without thinking about all the other places this virus is, maybe washington, d. C. , maybe the suburbs of baltimore, who knows where . The problem is we need a more system, less uneven response that has to be pretty uniform. Just because were seeing it in new rochelle doesnt mean its the only place in new york thats got it. That response does have to include things like much more prevalent testing, so we really have a handle on who has got it and who doesnt and a really good model is south korea if you look at their trends, you can see theyre beginning to bend in south korea. We also do need to inform people, we use the term social distancing like everyone knows what it means. Its not immediately obvious what that entails and how much you need to be separate from people. Explain. What should people know about that . A large part of it, people have come up with all these numbers. No more than 100 people to meet. The issue is density. How close are you to people. How easy is it for the droplets to spread . How much are you sort of packed in like sardines or not . That real thats a physical thing that is really important. And i do think we need to educate people to minimize their contact and stay home more. You can go out where there is no one else if youre going walking in the woods or something or going to a place where there arent other people but restricting how we move around is going to be important. I will note that not every but most of the Ivy League Schools for example, colleges, mine included, were going online. The second half of the semester is all going to be online. Students respect going to be in dormitories except those who cant go back to their home country and complete the semester. Youre seeing a lot of action but its not concerted and systematic and thats bothering me. Dr. Hotez, weve been checking in with you throughout the unfolding of the Global Pandemic and im curious, are we learning more about the virus itself . About the basics about transmission rate, which seems to be maybe lower than at first we thought and fatality rate and incubation period . Where is our knowledge about this . The transmission rate still seems to be pretty high as dr. Fauci mentioned. Its probably significantly higher than the influenza and mortality rate. But the you know, just to echo and reinforce things dr. Emanuel was saying, weve learned a few things from a recent analysis. My colleague at Harvard School of Public Health together with the student a doctoral student, did an analysis of the chinese cities in terms of how severe the epidemic is, with the extreme example being wuhan, where 9,000 people wound up in severely ill, with 2,000 in the icu versus a city like guangjo, where there was only 20. Where there was 20. Big difference, right . It looks like its primary due to how quickly you got on top of things after sustained Community Transmission started. So in wuhan, they let it go before six weeks before they implemented control and testing, whereas where they only had 20 cases, one week. Whats the Lesson Learned for the United States . Were now about three weeks into this in terms of sustained Community Transmission. We had our first case of Community Transmission around the end of april and so subtract a week before then. So were getting to the point where because were not doing adequate diagnostic testing and implementing those very important control measures that he pointed out, were in a situation we could risk being closer to wuhan and we cant be there. So now is a very critical period over the next couple of weeks where we have to be very aggressive about closing down major venues. We just listened to houston with the rodeo. Tough decision but the right decision and we have to do this all over the country and the reason is this, because if we miss that opportunity, we have our new problem is Surge Capacity in hospitals where were not going to have enough beds. Were not going to have enough ventilators and we dont want to go in that direction. So now is our big now is going to be the last chance. Weve already missed that over the last few weeks. Can i reemphasize something . Please. Which is so in the entire United States, we have about 800,000 hospital beds, a little under 800,000 hospital beds. In the entire United States we have under 70,000 adult intensive care unit beds. We have about 65,000 ventilators with the strategic supply, i heard it goes up slightly under 100,000. Thats our Maximum Capacity in the country at moment. If you imagine that, you know, even 2 of the population gets the coronavirus and we have about 6 who are seriously ill going to need a respirator, weve exhausted the supply just for those patients. Forget the heart attack patients and other patients that need it for any other reason. What peter said is right. We probably have missed two or three turns over the last few weeks where we could have gotten things down and just focussing on the hot spot, seattle, new rochelle, we need a more systematic country wide approach that doesnt have that much Surge Capacity in it. Dr. Hotez, final point to you. For people watching this, i struggled with this for the last three weeks, communicating in a way that doesnt induce panic but clear eyed about the risks and its worth to going back to the distinction between your individual risk, you random american, one of 330 million that you will get very sick and need to be hospitalized or may face life threatening illnesses, that individual risk for any person is low in the grand scheme of things and the risk to the society and Health Care System, which is extremely high at this point. Is that a fair way of phrasing it . Yeah, absolutely. Also, remember, its all about communicating what our Top Priorities are. This is what ive been disappointed about and weve lost a lot of time because of blanket statements that are not backed by data saying this is contained. This is the cold. This is the flu. When in fact, we know that there are specific groups that are at high risk including older individuals, those with underlying disabilities and our Health Care Workers. So what ive been looking for is at those White House Press briefings to say look, these are four big concerns. These are three or four populations were concerned about. This is why we need to get on top of this very quickly and here is what were doing about it. And historically, the American People responded very well to this. They understood this through ebola, zika, as we say, this is not our first rodeo. Right. So we know how to respond, and we just need that clear kind of concise messaging right now. All right. Can i just add one thing to chris, your point . Yeah. We also do know for any individual, the risk is low except we do know there are certain people correct. Those over 60 or 65, those with chronic illness, they are at high risk and what we have done in this country is aggregate them in Nursing Homes. Those are the most vulnerable people, people in Nursing Homes and we really have to, you know, social distance there, reduce the number of visitors probably to zero, make sure that people are gowning up and taking protective equipment so that we dont have that petrie plate just explode with coronavirus like it did in seattle, because almost every one of them is really on the shernlverge, just the cruise ships. Good point. Thank you both. Next, from Public School closings to the cancellation of large events. How Civic Society and local governments are lead bring the federal government is not, in two minutes. Eally good at vacationing. Start by booking your flight with expedia. Then unlock trip savings of up to 20 on nearly half a million hotels, car rentals, and activities that you can access any time before you fly. Save money. Afford to go on more vacations. Afford to go on more vacations. Get really good at vacationing. Start with expedia, save with expedia. They use stamps. Com all the services of the post office only cheaper get a 4week trial plus postage and a digital scale go to stamps. Com tv and never go to the post office again. Get a 4week trial pwhere you can find games, a diginews and highlights. All in one place, right on your tv. The new xfinity sports zone. Use your voice to search every stat and score. Follow the teams you love. And get notifications when the games about to start, with the xfinity sports zone, everybody wins. Now thats simple, easy, awesome. Say xfinity sports zone into your voice remote today. There is a very successful effort that we can take to slow the spread of this disease and thats to reduce the social interactions that are not necessary in our lives. This is an effective tactic. It is at hand all that requires is the will of active people to follow science and confidence that were all in this together and thats why were taking these steps. That is governor jay inslee of washington early today. Hes managing the worst coronavirus outbreak in the country and that included him announcing today they are banning events with more than 250 people. Its no small thing for the governor of the state to say we dont want you to have more than 250 people together. That is one of the cascading lists of decisions by local and state leaders and for us to slow the transmission of the virus, we need to take very big dramatic steps to limit public gatherings. Enormous coachella is postponed and south by southwest was canceled. The house and the senate are topping tours of the capitol il. Television shows such as nbcs the tonight show starring jimmy fallon and late night and hbo, abc the view are being shot without live audiences. The Golden State WarriorsBasketball Team decided to play last nights game with fans in attendance even though city officials urged them not to but now its no longer their choice following an order by the mayor, gatherings of more than 1,000 people are prohibited. So tomorrow nights game will be played without fans. Just hours ago, it was announced the entire ncaa tournament march madness will be played without fans. This is happening all around the world. In italy, all stores, commercial activity except for pharmacies and food markets are being mandated shut down. Ireland cancelled their st. Patricks day parade. The entire nation of denmark is closing universities and spain closed a stadium normally filled with thousands. It is happe