Monday, February 3, 2020

Task Force meeting daily. Repatriated people from Wuhan 150 tested negative; no positives thus far. Cases = 17,205 with 361 deaths; 26 countries have 180 international cases and within that there are 20 human to human transmission transmissions with no sustained transmission yet. Complicated issue with border crossings of Chinese at Canada and Mexico. Many come over, but screening capabilities are not like we have at airport. Travis AFB, Miramar, Lackland AFB are landing destinations for US Citizens coming from Wuhan so that we can implememnt institutional quarantines and medical care if needed. Spoke with George Gao tonight in China. George is the Director General of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He confirmed that infected people can be asymptomatic and that asymptomatic people can transmit. This is important since the recent NEJM paper that said that a Chinese woman who went from Shanghai to Germany and infected a business associate while she was asymptomatic was in fact mildly symptomatic and so the NEJM paper is incorrect. However, the fact is still true. Also, George was very sensitive and understandably defensive since he was the one who said early on that there was no human to human transmission and that the original 27 cases in the wet market reported on December 31, 2019 were animal to human when actually human to human transmission was occurring weeks before. The Wuhan health officials did not tell him this and he thus gave out false information. This lapse likely allowed the outbreak to take hold since Wuhan went about their business with 40,000 pot luck festivals without social distancing. Failure of HIV vaccine trial HVTN-702 (Uhambo) conducted in South Africa >5000 participants showed no efficacy at all. DSMB stopped trial due to futility PRESS: WTOP Radio; CNBC; TRT Turkish TV (x2); CGTN Chinese TV; On camera interview with Jennifer Ashton in VRC – ABC News; Lou Dobbs FOX News.