Episode 51-Hunter Howard Global Pandemic Coalition
Brian Kruger:
Welcome to the podcast The Common Bridge with Richard Helppie. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife Leslie are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, but with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children. My name is Brian Kruger, and from time to time I’ll be the moderator and host of this podcast.
And welcome to the Common Bridge. Rich’s guest today is Hunter Howard. Now like Rich, Mr. Howard is a highly successful entrepreneur in the healthcare industry space, but unlike Rich, fortunately, Mr. Howard is a COVID-19 patient, and very possibly patient zero in Texas, and he uses patient-I think he’s reluctant to say survivor-as you’ll hear in this podcast, as some of his effects are still lingering, but what Mr. Howard has done during his ongoing recovery is really quite inspiring and it’s made his insight to COVID-19 and its treatment and effects and possibly pass forward, very interesting and informative. So let’s join Rich and Hunter Howard in conversation.
Rich Helppie:
Welcome to the Common Bridge. Today we’re going to be talking about COVID-19, the novel Corona virus, and we have an exceptionally qualified guest with us today. Hunter Howard heads the Global Pandemic Coalition, and we’re very excited to talk about that. His professional background includes three healthcare companies, some at the leading edge of the changes healthcare has had to make as a result of the Corona virus. And also very importantly, Hunter has been a COVID patient and he’s recovered. And we’re very glad about that and hopeful that he will share some of that with us today. So Hunter, welcome to the Common Bridge and just so happy that you’ve joined us today.
Hunter Howard:
Rich it is great to be here. Thank you so much for having us.
Rich Helppie:
Great. So what we’re going to talk about today is your experience as a COVID-19 patient, your professional experience, a little bit about what the Global Pandemic Coalition does, and then let’s talk about where we are with cures and treatments and prevention and eradication. Because as a world we’re battling enormous social and economic costs of this pandemic. We’ll talk a little about what we know about vaccines and antibodies and herd immunity and social protocols. And of course, we’re going to get into some of the measurements, some of the statistics out there, and if there’s any conclusion today, it’s that things are inconclusive. And what was almost accepted as conventional wisdom a couple of weeks ago might be turned on its head tomorrow. That’s the nature of this pandemic, that we still today are dealing with a situation where there are far more material unknowns than there are knowns. Hunter will also share with us his conversation with the World Health Organization Director General David Navarro, and as always we’ll anticipate some education and perhaps some policy ideas. So Hunter, welcome. And let’s talk, first of all, your personal experience with COVID-19. When did you come down with this dreadful virus?
Hunter Howard:
Thanks, Rich. It was the very 1st of March and I was at a friend’s birthday, it was actually in Aspen, Colorado, a friend’s birthday. Either caught it on the plane coming back, or there was a group in the hotel there that I crossed paths with. So one of those two groups, it happened with the girl sitting behind me on the plane at home actually had COVID I later found out through a friend of a friend. So it was a really rough experience. It took me about four days for it to incubate. And then four of the sickest days of my life, and I had just…the pain was…I could barely breathe. I thought I might have to go into an ICU for a vent help, but I knew-at that point we didn’t know how bad the vents were-but it was a really rough experience. The sickest that I’ve ever been, that being said, my body-you don’t really remember how sick you were. And I just remember it was a terrible experience, but it was something I don’t wish on anybody, but something that anybody could get through also, from what I experienced.
Rich Helppie:
So you were able to get back home to Dallas area. What were some of your symptoms? Did you have the body aches and the high fever? And when did you seek treatment?
Hunter Howard:
Yes, so early-it was day four or five. I started with the dry cough and a light fever. I would not have thought that much about it, but you would just-you starting to hear things-otherwise I would not have been concerned. Then the next day, the fever really intensified. And also my breathing really became compromised very quickly for me, where I felt like I had a strap wrapped around my chest and was just having trouble with basic breathing. And I was absolutely credibly fatigued. The headaches were terrible. So I had about three or four days of that. I’m a healthcare professionals so I was able to get good access to people and they said, you need to rest and stay at home. And this is before I knew a lot of the cocktail solutions that have helped people out. So I missed on that, but took Tamiflu, took Tylenol, a couple of things, and then my body-the fever broke. And once it broke-is was really kind of a couple hours after taking Tylenol. Tylenol, in my opinion, did not solve it, but it was a very memorable, like I feel like I just broke the fever and I thought I was better at that point also. And that the bad part was behind me. The fever part was behind me at least.
Rich Helppie:
How are you doing today?
Hunter Howard:
It’s been interesting. And actually I really thought that it was behind me and there’s just growing kind of understanding that there’s a lot of lingering effects for a lot of people. I know some people are very lucky and they’re asymptomatic. They never feel anything. Some people have a couple of days of a mild flu and then, personal Facebook group-so a hundred thousand people-who have three or four months later just lingering effects. My lungs aren’t quite back to a hundred percent. I call them annoyances and I hope they’re just going to be annoyances, but my lungs, aren’t a hundred percent. The fatigue sets in pretty regularly, my toes have tingled for nine months, and you don’t want to [inaudible] toes tingling in neuropathy issues. Can take you down some scary paths. So I’m hoping that this is just a slow heal on a lot of these things.
Rich Helppie:
Were there others on your Facebook group that had the issues with the numbness in the toes?
Hunter Howard:
They do. And they’re starting to diagnose certain people with certain autoimmune issues or things like Guillain Barre-things that can lead to paralysis. So there’s a lot of downstream negative effects that we don’t know yet. It’s so early and I feel pretty good, but I don’t feel like a hundred percent, Hunter Howard though.
Rich Helppie:
And you were-if you don’t mind sharing your demographics-and I don’t believe you had any underlying major health concerns and you’re pretty healthy guy and not of the at risk age group.
Hunter Howard:
I’m 50 I’m. In fact, I just turned 50, and I am very active, pretty healthy. I have low vitamin D, my testosterone is not optimized and high, but other than that, no real issues.
Rich Helppie:
Well listen, we’re sure, glad you’re feeling better now and really happy that you’re here with us. Hunter, your experience as a healthcare professional, I know must have come in handy. You’ve had three companies. And could you just give a quick thumbnail on each of those businesses?
Hunter Howard:
Sure. I was with Fortune 100 company, Dell, doing outsourcing strategy for them, decided to apply that to healthcare. When I saw the technology could help improve from the medical billing side, so started a large medical billing company, had a large operation, [inaudible], so that’s a private equity firm. So you had the back office side, well then I went into the front around the Affordable Care Act, getting launched, so started a consultancy to really help understand-I love getting [inaudible], so helping people understand that. And then I started telemedicine company where we provide access to specialists through telemedicine, local testing with pharmacy also in local testing and then access to a specialists they need.
So it was easy for me to find the right doctors to talk to about this. And I was amazed right out of the gate is how much…how little anybody knew about this. And this was March. So I was ahead of the curve with what we’ve learned today, which we’re still learning every day. The top pathologists in Dallas, they brought me in 14 days later after I had the symptoms, I thought that they were the obvious ones and expected me to have antibodies by then. Not only did I not have antibodies, I still had COVID in my system. So we were learning with them. This whole thing has been a big lab experiment that’s kind of happening in real time in a very public view. And this-it’s been confusing.
Rich Helppie:
Indeed. And with that professional experience, so you’ve got the sophistication of international business. You’ve got the understanding of the policy aspects of our healthcare system. And actually, and I call our financing methods, methods because it’s not a system. And then telemedicine. And for those listeners that don’t know what telemedicine is, this is where your provider is accessing you through either the internet or dedicated equipment that can view and diagnose and treat you without being in the same location, which of course has accelerated during this pandemic and the resulting stay at home orders. So Hunter with this, now you’ve got this disease that you’ve struggled with, and continue to work through. And you’ve got this experience from your professional life and now the global pandemic coalition, what is it? And what does it do?
Hunter Howard:
Sure. So we’re really bringing together leaders, thinkers, researchers from six continents and to fight COVID-19. I expected, as I was sitting there in bed, that we were going to start seeing generalized response and even a global response to this global pandemic. And didn’t quite see what we expected. So really reached out to my friends, my different healthcare leader friends and said, we should be leaning into this. We should be putting something together. We should be bringing together the services and solutions that are needed to fight this pandemic. So ee’re trying to create a big tent and a big megaphone for the companies that are providing services and solutions. And we’re providing advice to state of Texas, the state of New Jersey. We’ve been helping Disney with some things. There’s a lot of different things we’re helping on the testing, the tracing side, but really it’s a big tent for anybody who has a COVID relief service or solution, and just trying to bring best programs, the best companies to, to help fight this global pandemic.
Rich Helppie:
And if my understanding is correct, you’ve reached over 100 companies and that represents businesses in six continents. And for those that are interested in knowing more about this, we have posted the website of the Global Pandemic Coalition at RichardHelppie.com, recommend that you look into that. And Hunter, my reading of this is that in the event that we don’t get a vaccine or until we get a vaccine, that you’ve developed a framework about how to look at this pandemic and maybe use that framework as a road map toward how we process this as a society. Could you tell us just a little bit about that framework please?
Hunter Howard:
Absolutely. So one of the things that we saw was, we have governors, mayors, and CEOs, each being asked to come up with their own strategy for dealing with the global pandemic. And that’s frankly above everybody in the world’s pay grade. So what we’re trying to do is really bring together the best in class solutions to help each different element here. So we’ll help a CEO and bring it together there. Now, some healthcare is very different for every CEO in the world where they have to think about-healthcare is no longer just buying insurance for the company-it’s actually, how do I bring my workplace, my employees back to work safely. And so we have a lot of programs now that, and some of the programs we’ve been presenting to Disney on, how do you reopen your parks? How do you also do testing for your employees and create employee passports where they do testing, where they have an app where they can, every morning, say here is-so first we antibody test them and with PCR, test them every morning, they would go through and check a list of, have you experienced any of these symptoms? And also have you been around any large groups.
There are a number of things like that. And that just helps us understand what employees need to go to work, which employees maybe should be considered-called [inaudible] the second level of triage, the same thing on the community side also where we’re trying to figure out how to re-open our communities. And so what we’ve done, we’ve done analysis on all-Scott Gottlieb Andy Slavitt, the Safra Institute, what the recommendations are for re-opening safely, the four phases for most of them, boil them all together. And thus, we’re helping the city of Dallas, Texas on how to re-open sensibly. And really what it comes down to is blocking and tackling, to be honest with you. And the biggest components are testing and contact tracing. And then also kind of preparing your local hospitals and healthcare systems be able to take in anybody that needs to come in. So what are the levels that hospitals can take. And then also making sure that we get people tested and traced immediately, which is really the key to this whole thing.
Rich Helppie:
The contact tracing that some of the Asian countries have used are probably not going to work here, given the invasive nature. And as I read on your website from the economist, Paul Romer, he says a contact tracing is certainly something that we need to be doing, but he said we’ve got very unreliable data and we don’t have enough of it. And he says it’s a helpful tool for disease surveillance, but probably not a thing that we can rely on. And I think where he’s leading is, let’s make sure that we contain the virus and things that we do know work, which is social distancing and masking and the like.
Hunter Howard:
The testing and the tracing side to me is the blocking and tackling. And also really what is tracing, what is surveillance? So if you think about it this way-right now in the US we have a five day backlog on tests. And so it’s taking us five days to get someone in for testing, often. And then also you’re waiting a number of days before you’re getting that test back. And then also there’s a five day incubation period. So what has happened in these countries is, you have to test immediately. So one thing we failed to do is prepare our communities for immediate testing of anybody who has the symptoms, or also anybody who’s been around a known infected. But Wuhan, before they re-opened up, they did 11 million tests in two days-the entire city-before they re-opened up.
So on the testing side, you have to test immediately and you have to test robustly. And then the tracing side, well, you need to be tracing…so the individual gets sick. You need to be contacting every single individual who has gotten sick within 48 hours. You need to prepare them for a test. And you also needed to identify who these people are and then also get them into testing and then help them isolate so they’re not infecting more people. So really the testing, there’s a couple of pieces to it. One is just the phone calls and that’s a primary. So that’s what Scott Gottlieb requested $39 billion of funding to be able to do tracing. Just, this is the key component to isolating the virus. And so with $39 billion, and it really is just call centers with people calling and saying, who have you been around? And this is how you immediately identify and isolate people who are infected.
And what we’ve done instead, let’s look at Arizona, Florida, and Texas. What we’ve done instead is we’re letting 20 to 40 year olds go out to bars, be around 50 to a hundred people in a bar in close settings, allow the environment where they’re talking loud with each other, they’re infecting each other. The positivity rate’s over 20% now of who is getting the test now. And so these individuals, then they go to work the next day and then they come back to a bar the next night. And so the amount of people that these people are in contact with before they’re pre-symptomatic at this point, and that’s when you’re also the most contagious, infectious is when you’re pre-symptomatic. And then these young people also often are asymptomatic as well. And so they’re never showing any symptoms. So these people that are in these groups are going out without masks, into bars, into restaurants, into the workplace. And that is why it’s a forest fire of infections right now that we have no control over. And so the blocking and tackling pieces that we all sacrifice now, where we stayed in for a couple months, and then what should have happened during that time, you prepare the healthcare system to control it to be able to accept anybody in their beds. And then also, how do you do immediate, rapid testing of anybody? So we can do that as soon as you have a symptom, or as soon as someone who’s been around someone who’s been affected, you get them in for testing and you understand, do we need to isolate them
And then the tracing part, we’ll go into some of the details when tracing. We have these tracing programs around the world going on right now. We have a manufacturing plant in India where we do proximity tracing and they have five different cohorts of workers. So as individuals are coming in, and if one person in your cohort gets sick, that cohort then has to all get tested. The other four cohorts are still working. And we know through proximity tracing who in your cohort you have been around. So it just helps to understand. This is the same tools we use in South Korea, the same tools in Singapore. Proximity tracing in the community is not something that’s going to be readily available here. But on the tracing side, if you can get to everybody within 48 hours that has been infected, find out everybody that they’ve been in contact with in the last five days when they’ve been in the pre-symptomatic most infectious stage, and then tell those people you need to isolate until we can confirm that you don’t have it. That is how you control this virus. And that’s, to me, that’s not that invasive, it’s another another tool that we have.
Rich Helppie:
The basic part would be the like South Koreans where everyone has a wristband on that broadcasts your location and your temperature, more invasive would be Singapore where they have a camera outside your apartment. And the other thing that I think people need to understand is that when the term surveillance is used, this does not mean surveillance of individuals or populations. It means surveilling the disease spread and trying to make sense of the data. And to your point, in Michigan, the press conference that was just held, we’re recording this on Thursday, the 9th of July. The governor said that 20% of the new cases are the 20 to 34 year olds. So the disease is behaving differently based on the patient cohort. And one of those divisions clearly is age. And as we try to figure out who to test, what’s occurring is-first of all-people, of course, with symptoms are getting tested. People coming in for other medical issues, and illness, a pregnancy, what have you, are getting tested, the healthcare workforce is getting surveilled. And then there are just people that want to get tested. Like I’m going to go visit my grandparents and I want to get tested to make sure that I don’t have the virus. We used to call those the “worried well”, and now it’s more precautionary. But also in terms of how states are doing the data, they’re all different. And we know that there’s co-mingling going on of actual results from diagnostic tests, and also with antibody testing and all of that being lumped into positive. And again, coming back to the only thing that is conclusive, is that things are inconclusive. We know that there’s been reports about the disease spreading, and one of those places is your state in Texas. What is going on in the state of Texas?
Hunter Howard:
Everybody around the world has been sacrificing and different areas of the world sacrificing much differently. And when you are staying in and where your businesses are shut down, you feel like you’re sacrificing a lot. We did not sacrifice as aggressively. And then when we did re-open, we immediately re-opened up the bars and the restaurants. And we went to 75% and to 100% before the phased re-opening, it was recommended by really all the best policy experts. And so right now in Texas, we are, I think 4.8 times higher hospitalization rate than we were a month ago, right now. And so people were going out-really it was the bar scene and obviously the protest did not help, but it’s people going out in the bar scene, and Texans are very unique in that they are very patriotic about about their rights and they don’t want to wear masks. And so that’s what’s making it skyrocket in Texas right now.
Rich Helppie:
And even with that surge as of today, or last night, the death rate for cases in Texas, these are the confirmed cases and confirmed deaths as 1.29%, whereas contrast that with New York city-over 10%.
Hunter Howard:
That’s the best news. And the news on that, and this is so important. We are learning every single day on this. So what happened in New York, where one is, the system could not handle all the people that were coming in to their hospitals and they were putting too many people on the fence. There’s so many things that we have learned, whether it be vents is a last resort and not for everybody, the therapeutics that are working right now, whether it be the plasma treatments, dexamethasone, the steroid, very common steroid has been very effective. Remdisivir has been a very effective program also for people at very late stages. So there’s so many different things that we’re doing that are helping out and that’s the best news. It looks like it’s becoming more infectious. It appears that it’s becoming much more infectious, but where the case fatality rate is decreasing just because we’re learning how to handle this better.
Rich Helppie:
Indeed. If you look at the five States that had the worst outbreaks, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey. 43% of the deaths are in nursing homes or related to nursing homes. Those five States represent 17% of the population of the United States. Yet they represent 26% of the cases and almost half of the deaths. Whereas you look at the states in the news lately at the front end of the curve now, because these numbers could look very different a few months from now, but Texas, Florida, Arizona, California combined represent 30% of the population of the United States. So substantially greater than those first five states, yet they have about the same percentage of cases in the United States. There’s really not a statistical difference. And the death rate instead of 48% of the deaths is 11%. So I think it does show that we’re learning. And I think your point about ventilators is well taken. That seemed to be the critical path. The blood gases were showing that patients should be put on a vent, although they were sitting up right and speaking. And they found that four out of the five people put on vents perished, and thank God they didn’t put you on a vent. And so we’re learning. And the discharges and the requirements in the nursing homes that we saw in New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, that they were still looking around for a policy solution. But across the country, what we’ve seen now is the rise in the deaths at home. There’s some new reporting out of Houston as of this morning about deaths at home. And they are either COVID deaths, or COVID related, or fear of going to a health care facility because of getting COVID. So that’s a policy that is still in the air about what the right thing to do is. And I guess the death rate coming down also could just be that younger people are getting this and younger people typically are going to be more healthy.
Hunter Howard:
To me, the younger people are almost like kindling. And so they’re like a brush fire. So the brush fire is burning really intensely right now. And these are groups that many of them are going to be asymptomatic. They’re not going to feel it, they’re going to be going out, they’re going to be spreading it. And then all of a sudden, when it gets so intense and there’s such a high positivity rate of the test right now, that’s when you have no control over it. And that’s when all of a sudden you cannot control your mother or your father or your uncle, or you can’t control your 60 year old school teacher-a kindergarten teacher. And so that’s where so much of the fear is that we have not been able to control the transmissions, because really the transmission is based on two things: get your healthcare system set up, but also do you have less than 5% positivity in the testing rate of people who have it, and also you need 14 days of trailing transmissions. And so these are all the guidelines from the top policy makers. Then you can re-open up once you have that under control. And we took a different approach here. We wanted to open up, and these are the reasons why we may not have football in the fall. This is the reason why you might not be growing hockey games. Our kids might not be in schools. We were more concerned with what are the essential workers and things like that than we were with let’s have a national federal program, and let’s kind of lock these areas down that have issues and let’s do things in a slow, methodical manner.
Rich Helppie:
I think the statistics support what you’re saying, because as the kindling theory supported, because so many of the cases that resulted in severe outcomes and death were caught in the home. And we know today that just like a group of people going to an indoor bar and not having their masks on and speaking loudly and being there for a prolonged period of time, the viral load transmitted will infect others. They go home and they’re living in a home and constantly circulating air with an at risk person, a parent, a grandparent, someone that has that. So I can see where that kindling theory goes up. But Hunter you’ve, I thought, made an excellent point that this is a worldwide problem and above the pay grade. You had opportunity to have a conversation with World Health Organization Director General David Navarro. What are you allowed to tell us about that?
Hunter Howard:
Yes, so we had a podcast that we did to a private group of healthcare and CEOs around the world. And David’s an amazing guy guy. He’s been through this so many times. So he’s been through the Ebola and SARS and all this. And so he was very [inaudible]. Here’s a charming old English guy was who was able to deliver this carious commentary in [inaudible] old English way. But he thinks that we are-best case scenario-two and a half years from a vaccine. And also if we do get a vaccine, a vaccine doesn’t mean-the flu vaccine is 40% effective whereas, measles vaccine is 97%. So we’re much more likely to have a flu type of vaccine than a measles vaccine.
We talked a lot about kind of Brazil and Pakistan and India. And so there’s so many countries around the world that are not set up-their healthcare systems-to deal with this. And you really think about social inequities in so many countries, in some places it’s an inconvenience where your lifestyle has been changed. If you’re in Panama and you are allowed to leave your home in a favela environment for one hour a day, and be on month four of that-that is a dramatically different situation. With the second-and right now it’s running rapidly through some of these countries. So as we look at this as maybe a hoax, now this is not a hoax. These countries have much more draconian lockdowns than we have been on. And these favelas with three generations of family living together in a very small place, once it starts ripping through those small villages and favelas, their healthcare system can’t handle it. So it was a very dour very conversation of where this is going, and doesn’t look like it’s waves, looks like this is happening where it’s mutating. And it’s becoming more infectious, maybe not more deadlier. And the good news about these-when they do mutate-is they become more infectious often, but then the people, the spreaders are dying off with the most severe cases. And then the younger people that are spreading it, are spreading it with the less infectious cases. So there’s absolutely some theory that this will slow down over time, but it’s going to take some time.
Rich Helppie:
If there were a better climate for communication, I think people would understand that we only know what we know at a certain period of time. And that that understanding may change. That doesn’t mean you were trying to hoax me when you told me what you told me a month ago, which may be completely different. Like, by way of example, you and I were chatting yesterday about hydroxychloroquine and that this is going to be preventive and a therapeutic, remember, our doctors were taking it, and then it was, wait a minute, it’s an anti-malarial drug, it’s really not going to be effective and it could hurt your heart. Nobody take it. Well, then two days ago, Henry Ford health system comes out and says, now we’ve got something that kind of looks like it shortens the stay. And, if I could just put you on the spot for a second, is that you said, when you had it-had the disease-if they had offered you hydroxychloroquine, you probably would have taken it. But now based on what you know today, you wouldn’t. Fair enough?
Hunter Howard:
Absolutely. I was talking to emergency room doctors in New York that were prescribing it pretty liberally back then, and they thought it was having pretty good results. So I absolutely would have taken it if I had gotten sick a week or two later, once I got that information, now I probably wouldn’t. I think one of the things that’s become clear is that we’re moving so quickly and we’re learning every day. And because we’re learning everyday, it gives different people with positions to cherry pick the information that supports their thesis or their side. That’s so easy to do, the data isn’t perfect, the information isn’t perfect. We are one big lab experiment where the smartest doctors in the world are learning something new every day. So we are an open lab experiment happening in real time and we’re learning. And so, I think, rather than kind of focusing on what number might be wrong or does that support your cause, just be respectful of this is a really complicated time where we’re learning every day.
Rich Helppie:
I think that’s well said that we are one big lab experiment. Let’s just touch briefly on herd immunity and or a vaccine. And that vaccines, I think, are a longer way off in that we really don’t know yet how this virus behaves. We don’t know how effective antibodies are. We don’t know how long they last and vaccine basically just stimulate your antibodies. So that seems like it’s going to be a tough target. And then herd immunity, frankly from all the data we’re looking at lately, doesn’t look that promising. Any commentary on either vaccine or herd immunity as an exit strategy from this thing.
Hunter Howard:
Herd immunity is really interesting. We’ve been putting a lot of work into that and we’ve actually come up with a global herd immunity testing program where we’ve got a QR coded app that you can upload the information from any antibody test in the world. And we’ve got one partner that’s producing 1 million highly sensitive, highly accurate tests per day, that we’re in contact with people about doing the international program, where it’s a disposable, test that you take a picture of the results afterwards. It comes back into our database. So it’s really important on the surveillance side to start understanding how this is spreading, how much of the population has it. And then also to have a lot of information we’re able to gather on reinfection rates and comorbidities and different people that are having different types of symptoms. So it’s a really important kind of platform for us. But right now we might have-you need to get to 60 or 70% infected before the herd immunity really is strong enough. So we’re along ways away from-it’s really hopefully not the approach we can take-relying on herd immunity, understanding herd immunity is incredibly important part to this. So what are we looking at? We’re looking at the masks. The masks work, the masks they help slow down the transmission. The contact tracing helps you identify and isolate those that are ill, and nobody wants to be isolated, but if that’s going to help us keep our teachers healthy, keep them in schools, like keeping a 24 year old at home for the two weeks that he might be infected, that’s a really interesting conversation we need to start having right now. The hygiene side, it looks like a lot of states are going to maybe take a step back on the re-opening. And I think there’s going to be really difficult conversations on what do we need to do right now to sacrifice, to make sure we can get our kids back at school. We can re-open our economy in a sensible way, and then waiting on the vaccine that might be two and a half years away. But we are getting better at the case fatality rates. And that’s the most promising, that we’re getting better at that-infections are burning wildly right now. But it’s not just about mortality though. We’re learning so much about the longer term effects on your lungs. Let’s say you have this four months later, lung issues, heart issues, neurological issues-my toes are tingling. What does that mean? Maybe it’s an annoyance for the rest of my life. Maybe it goes away next week. We don’t know any of this. So there’s so much more to this than just counting hospital beds, mortality rates, infection rates, and it’s complex uncharted territory.
Rich Helppie:
Indeed. And this is where those people that we have elected or have been appointed, trying to come up with the right policy solutions. We’ve had travel bans put on, travel bans, put off, we’ve had stay at home orders put in place, revised, lifted. It is uncharted territory. Hunter, this has been a great conversation, we could likely go on for hours. But as we wrap up, what didn’t we cover today that perhaps we should have discussed?
Hunter Howard:
Yes, I think we’ve had some really tough conversations and hopefully we’re kind of open to understanding how do we put this behind us? How do we re-open our economy safely? How do we re-open our schools? And I think there’s some tough sacrifices need to be made-that’s it.
Rich Helppie:
What would those-let me ask you-would those sacrifices include not going out into mass protests in that the connection-you mentioned that the protests and rallies in Houston probably couldn’t be ignored. Yet I read today a headline that said Tulsa has an outbreak somehow out of a poorly attended rally. Both could be true, both could be false. And that New York city’s mayor has said that the contact tracing is not going to allow asking if you’ve been to a rally or a protest. So I mean, I think we have to drop all those value measures. So people are going to value whether they go to a protest or a rally differently, we need to accept that. But also we need to make people aware if there is a consequence. If it’s perfectly fine that we’re all out there with masks, great, that’s a low risk, but these are these are real trade offs that we have to think about.
Hunter Howard:
They really are real trade offs. I mean, we were at a point right now where, I don’t think in March, we expected to have eight to 10 days of test results-waiting time-for so many people or 60,000 cases a day or a thousand deaths per day, or 10% positivity rate.
Rich Helppie:
But we didn’t know what we didn’t know at that point. From a policy perspective or from an action, what would be the best policies today and what would be maybe some of the worst? And then any action or actions that you’d recommend people might take-just your closing thoughts, if you could kind of wrap that up. And I know that our listeners are really going to value what you’ve shared here today. And I encourage everyone to go to the Global Pandemic Coalition website. This is ever evolving. It’s an initiative of very passionate, very knowledgeable people and very comprehensive. I think we can bring down some of the noise that we get from the reporting industry if people embrace what Hunter Howard has led. But Hunter, any closing thoughts on policies or actions-pro or con-that you might recommend?
Hunter Howard:
I’ll make two points here. One is the transmissions-are not transmissions as how many people you’re affecting or out of absolute control. And so we need to do a better job of testing, tracing, hygiene, mask wearing. And we might have to kind of slow down some of the re-openings while we get those control in certain markets. So that’s one thing is we’ve got to control transmission.
The other part is we are really kind of exciting the enthusiasm for the Global Pandemic Coalition of these [inaudible] companies around six continents. We’re opening up the COVID Exchange. It’s a marketplace that’s going to open up in about a week, probably end of next week. And it’s all the company services and solutions from testing to workplace management, to PPE, to all these different things. So it’s going to be covid.exchange, a marketplace. There’s going to be a really important component to just everything we’re doing. We’re just trying to stitch together a global and federal program of all different solutions that are needed to help get this under control and help our CEOs or mayors or governors with the best in class solution. So we are excited. We are building this-really kind of passionate leaders in our communities around the world who are just working together to fight the spread of COVID.
Rich Helppie:
We’ve been visiting this morning with Hunter Howard of the Global Pandemic Coalition. We hope everybody will join in policy discussions and also encourage everyone to ask those that we’ve elected to serve us, to quit fighting each other on a partisan basis, and pay attention to the very real issues of the day and reflect more of what Hunter Howard has said. Let’s go find solutions based on real data. Let’s be forgiving with each other about what we know and what we don’t know. And let’s consume news programming that actually is news and not designed to inflame us. This is Rich Helppie on the Common Bridge. Thank you everybody, so long.
Brian Kruger:
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