Coronavirus Explained by Ryan Gorman

family safe. Our first guest is gonna help us better understand the virus itself. I'm joined now by the Chairman of Medicine at St. Joseph University Hospital, Dr Bob Leahda Dr Lohida, thank you so much for helping us better understand COVID nineteen. The first item I want to touch on is what a coronavirus is and what makes this particular one unique. Okay, a coronavirus, This is a fairly

easy question. Coronaviruses are RNA viruses. They're very infectious. The cousins are measles and viruses that cause the common cold, which are also coronaviruses, but they're not novel coronavirus is the ones that caused the common cold. We've had around for years and years, and when your listeners get sniffles and you know, start to cough, etcetera, and and it's usually early winter or early spring. Um, this is coronavirus

as a rule. But the novel coronavirus, the coronavirus of is a specific mutant to which we have no immunity. We've had heard immunity from the old coronaviruses that infect us and cause the common cold, but we don't have any specific community to the new coronavirus. Now, these viruses are very infectious, so you breathe on somebody and you

can transmit the disease. The reason you do that is because you have receptors for these viruses in your tongue, the cheeks, your nose, your lungs, and even in your heart. And so when you get loaded with virus, your immune system has got to fight this virus that it has never seen before. So there's all kinds of new immune processes that go in which are very complicated. They go into effect to try to overcome this new infection. And

that is primarily a coronavirus. Now there the reason it's called coronavirus is a covering of the virus, and this is extremely small um virus which can only see under the electron microscope, so it's invisible to the naked eye. These viruses have projections that stick out that make them look like they have a crown, and that's why it's

called the corona or crown virus. So how does it spread and what's the life cycle like from the time of infection to when symptoms may begin to present themselves to when someone's all better. Yeah, so that's that's a good question. Now, the problem with this virus is that you can have it and not know it. Um when someone is exposed to somebody who's definitely infected proven infected, it takes about five days at the least to show symptoms,

and the median time is eleven point five days. So we like to quarantine people for two weeks because we know that within two weeks you're gonna show signs of the infection. So that's the rule of thumb. Now, the problem with this virus, as I just said, is that you can have it and not know it. And about of people that are infected with this will have something that you would consider a head cold or a mildly

scratchy throat and that's it. Nothing else. And then there's twenty of people who may have what we in medicine call coal morbidityes. That is, you either have diabetes, you're on chemotherapy, you're an alcoholic, you smoke too much, you have bad asthma, you have cop D. If you're older, you have emphysema. People like that that get this virus from somebody else wind up with bay had kinds of respiratory problems, lung problems, and most of the deaths that

occur from pneumonia and overwhelming lung infection. And that's why everybody has to be checked out and everybody has to be careful because we don't know who those people are that have these these glitches in their immune systems. We're talking to the Chairman of Medicine at St. Joseph University Hospital, Dr Bob Lajita here on My Heart Radio. There's two other types of illnesses that a lot of people are

dealing with at the moment, the flu and allergies. How can people tell them Apart from COVID nineteen well, COVID nineteen, as as Tony Fauci, the head of the NIH state, is about ten times worse than the flu. That's when you get the bad infection. You'll run a high fever, but you do that with the flu. If you haven't been immunized. You'll get muscle aches and pains, You'll have

nausea and perhaps vomiting, maybe some diarrhea. All of these things are similar to that which you would get when you get the flu, and it's ex extremely difficult to tell the difference. But the difference is we have a vaccine for the flu, and we also have a rapid test we do in the emergency room to determine whether you have the flu. We can do it on site. Most hospitals have flu swabs and flu tests that they can do and you can get a result within an hour.

Um The allergies are very easy. You don't run a high fever. With allergies. You you have sniffles, you your you know, your nose turns red, you cough up a lot of gunk. But that's not the same thing as the flu, and it certainly is not the same thing as COVID nineteen. You just brought up testing. Can you explain for a moment what we should know about tests for this coronavirus and why they seem to be a bit more complicated than say a test for the flu. Yeah.

So the reason they are difficult is that the testing, because coronas are very common, the regular garden variety coronas, we have to be able to discern which one is COVID nineteen. There's a very complicated pro sets which revolves around the fact that this is a DNA virus, and we do something called polymerase chain reaction on the sample. That's why regular hospitals don't have at this point the

capability of testing for this virus. It has to go to the state Health Department, and before that, it had to go to the Communical Disease Center better known as a c DC. You know the PCR, which we routinely do for things like diarrheal infections. We do the PCR for tuberculosis. Now this has this is a test that has streamalized streamlined diagnosis of infections. Thirty years ago, we didn't have anything like this. We would have to culture

you for TV. We would have to find out, you know, in your stool if you had organisms that cause diarrhea. Now we can do the same thing for coronavirus, but we have to be able to produce the markers, namely the r N a ribonucleic acid from the virus, which we can get. We have to multiply that and then we have to create these little tests that will define and show us that you the patient has an antibody or something that really reacts with this and what's called

the polymeray chain reaction. The polymeray chain reaction is a little complicated to describe for your listeners, but suffice it to say that that's the reason we haven't had tests upfront. Really quickly, we're talking to the Chairman of Medicine at San Choseph University Hospital, Dr Bob Lajida. A lot of information is floating online suggestions for how people can keep themselves in their families better protected. What are some practices

or products that we know actually work. Handwashing with soap works, purel or hand sanitizers work. If you can get ahold of some. We have them on the walls here. I have a bottle right on my desk in front of me. Here. I have several bottles at home and I wipe my hands down. And I also get those you know, those wipes we use in the gym wipe things down like jim stuff. If you're going to a gym and you're working out with a lot of other people, you want

to really wipe the machines down. You should be doing that anyhow, but now you really should do that. If you go to the theater, you should wipe the chair down before you sit down and watch a movie. And most people are going to go to theaters and movie theaters and sit with two people today, Nor are they going to go to Broadway shows and do the same thing. Or flying an airplane, you gotta wipe You should have

done this before Corona. You gotta wipe the seat down, You gotta wipe the tray table down and make sure that things are pretty clean because these viruses can stay on surfaces for upwards of two days, and some people are saying even longer. What about face masks. Well, with my patients that have certain illnesses, I make them wear face masks. Now, the face mask they wear is the cloth face mask. The N ninety five face masks is the face mask that grips around your nose and is

and is seamless. You you you breathe through that mask, but there's no leakage of air around it. The regular cloth face mask does one thing. It protects you from touching your face. Because if you handle uh, some object that's been contaminated with the virus and you touch your face, that's a problem. You'll get the infection. It'll go right up into your narries of your nose or into your mouth.

And everybody touches their face. So we're saying wear a mask of regular cloth mask and will prevent you from touching your face. Also, wash your hands as much as you can and keep the hands as sterile as possible. Now, if you are infected and you're coughing up phlegm and you're copping up what you think maybe virus, you should wear a nice and mask or at the least a surgical mask wherever you go. And frankly, you shouldn't go anywhere.

You should stay in your house. Uh, don't go to the emergency room, don't go to your doctor's office because you're gonna contaminate everybody else that's there. If you have trouble breathing or you're running a super high fever, then you go to the emergency rumor then you go to your doctor's office, dial get an ambulance and get over there or have somebody drive you. That's my advice. Is there anything else about this disease or outbreak that you

think it's important we know? I think I think there's not much we need to know right now. There's very little known about the course it's going to take, whether it's going to fade away in the summer or whether it's going to continue into the fall. I do hope that we have a vaccine in the early fall, September October time, so that we can all get immunized with

the flu. At the same time we can get vaccinated against Corona UH nineteen COVID nineteen, because that was that's the only sure fire way that we're gonna be able

to control this infection. As you know, it's it's devastating certain countries in Europe, like Italy and UH, countries like China, and and it's just been devastating to all sorts of populations, especially the elderly, those elderly people who are quite ill with lung disease or people who chain smoke, UH probably even people who smoke pot You've got to be understanding

that your lungs are irritated. And when you have an irritated lung, it sets you up for roaring infection with this virus because there are receptors in the lung for the virus. Chairman of Medicine at St. Joseph University Hospital, Dr Bob Lahda. Dr Lahda, thank you so much for your time and thank you for helping us better understand everything we need to know about COVID nineteen. You're quite

welcome and thanks for having me. Next, let's turn to someone who can shed some light on the local, state, and federal response to the coronavirus outbreak, joining me now as a former counter terrorism and community outreach official and former chief spokesman for the New York City Office of Emergency Management, Jared Bernstein. Jared, thank you for joining us here on iHeart Radio. Let's start with the organization's federal, state, and local that our front and center in the handling

of this COVID nineteen response. What can you tell us about them? Sure, well, depending upon where you live, you will have a city or county or even cown office of Emergency Management and Public Health Authority, and they're really

the front line of defense. They're going to be working with local physicians and other medical providers, hospitals, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities to really understand what they're seeing in the field in terms of patients, uh, symptomatic, where people are coming from, and then they're going to report that information up to a state department of health, and then the state emergency management or territorial emergency management agency is

going to be involved, and those all ladder up to the federal Emergency Management Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes for Health. So really everybody is in this now. The entirety of the federal government is involved with fighting this outbreak, and everybody has their role to play here. So communication is clearly important. So the right information is going from local communities to the state level and then

eventually to the federal level too. Yeah, that's correct, And and you know, communicating with the public in an an outbreak like this is probably as much as important or more important than the actual clinical care that you're giving, because this this outbreak is going to infect a certain

number of people. But what we really need to do is make sure that we can focus medical resources on people who are most vulnerable, people who may have compromise immune systems, people who may be elderly, have other some some kind of medical condition going on. And the only way we can do that is if they're public at

large cooperatives. And if you're sick and you think you might have COVID nineteen, you can contact your your healthcare provider, but chances are, unless you have one of those other conditions, they're gonna tell you to try and ride this out at home, obviously monitoring if your fever gets too high or if you have any other kind of secondary symptoms other than than what is you know, generally associated with

with this virus. And so that's going to allow our public help, you know, resources to go to the people who needed the most. But the only way we can do that is if we are regularly as authorities briefing people, and people believe that what they're being told by government is accurate and that they're getting accurate and timely information. Um. We always used to say that you want to tell people,

here's what we know, Here's what we don't know. Here's what we're trying to find out, and here's what we're doing about it, and here's when you will hear from us again, and kind of keep repeating that drum deal over and over and over again until people can come to depend on if you can do it every twelve hours or every six hours or every twenty four hours and make sure people have the latest and greatest information

so they can make good decisions for their families. A lot of people are hearing about emergency declarations, which can sound a little frightening, but there's a purpose to them. What actions do these declarations typically lead to. Sure, they differ from state to state and from government to government, but in general, emergency declarations allow executives, either mayors or county executives or governors to circumvent state rules. Usually they're

related to overtime, to collective bargaining, to procurement. Sometimes they involve quarantine, uh suspension of some kind of you know,

normal civil liberties. But in general, what they're really we used for is to be able to buy things quickly that we need without maybe going out to a ninety day bid process or maybe lifting cap on caps on overtime For particular job titles of critical critical employees, or maybe ordering people into into work who we need to come in and maintain our vital infrastructure like water and sewer and electric and so emergency declarations are a means

to do that. At the federal level, an emergency declaration typically means that FEMA is the President has declared a major federal disaster, and it frees up FEMA to start paying states and localities the cost of dealing with at whatever the disaster is. A lot of times you hear about it with a hurricane or a coastal storm or

a tornado, or even a major snowfall. If you get a few feet of snow that overwhelms local or state resources, uh, you can get a limited federal disaster declaration to help reimburse on the back in for infrastructure and for uh, you know, the human capital costs of dealing with these things. We're talking to former counter terrorism and community outreach official and former chief spokesman for the New York City Office of Emergency Management, Jared Bernstein here on iHeart Radio. Lots

of events are being canceled across the country. Large gatherings are being banned. What goes into those decisions, well, I mean, there's there's lots of consideration, um, but basically you need to figure out who's at risk, what the unintended first, second and third order consequences are of closing down any institution or series of institutions, whether it be public schools,

private schools, Broadway theaters, large gatherings. Um. Sure, it's a very prudent decision to you know, close down large gathering areas, but what are you you know, who are going to pay the people who work at those places? And how are those people are going to afford to feed their families if they're not getting paid? So really, uh, you try to take as as much of a holistic view as you can to any kind of second and third

order consequences of the decisions you make. But at the end of the day, elective leaders and they are appointed staffs and teams have to make the call. That's what that's that's what they get paid for. And you know, sometimes they're gonna be right and sometimes they're gonna be wrong, but they have to make decisions and and you know that's what they're there for. Uh, And you know that's

what it is. And I'm assuming in most of these instances there's some kind of coordination between public officials and the private sector, especially when major sports leagues decided to suspend games, which has a huge impact on the community. Yes, I think, you know, normally it's made uh at a

more local level. Um the for example, the head of the Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks would be coordinating with City Hall and with the New York City Office of Emergency Management on a snowfall or a blackout or something like our coastal storm. I think what we're seeing here that's quite different is that whole leagues or just shut down. Uh. And that's not something that we've ever seen, at least in my lifetime, where it's

being done wholesale. I can tell you that in the post nine eleven world, where there was a tremendous impact on the financial sector in downtown Manhattan, lots of cities and states have made a real effort to engage the private sector at every level of emergency planning. In New York, it is a very common occurrence to have a regular conference call an update for leadership in the private sector throughout the year, and especially in times of you know,

an active incident. I think the only difference we're seeing here is just the scale of it because it is a nationwide issue at this point. Final question for you. We live in an age of memes and viral social media posts. How important is it for everyone to get their information from the right sources and really be careful with what they share. I think that's a great that's

a great point and a great question. I know that there is you know, a lot of suspicion of what people call fake news these those but it's really important in an emergency situation to get your information from the elected and appointed leadership of your city, of your state, of the country, and not be taking it from forward that somebody may have said, you know, all this is from a friend who works at the police department, this

is from a friend who's a doctor. Well, until that person is in a position of authority where they're giving direction and they will be held to account if it's wrong, you should not be relying on the information. So I think we need to, you know, utilize that The Centers for Disease Control has an amazing amount of information on their website at TVC dot gov. Each state has a health department, and they are all using using their websites and having a tremendous amount of information up there for

folks to folks to put on there. And individual employers, you know, large companies are all doing really uh good job at trying to inform their employees. And then you know, individual smaller businesses are going to have to work with their local Department of Small Business Services or local health department in order to make sure that they have the information.

Former counter terrorism and Community Outreach official and former chief spokesman for the New York City Office of Emergency Management Jared Bernstein, Jared, thank you so much for your time and insight. Thank you finally to help us better understand what's happening with the markets and the US economy. We're joined by CNBC contributor Ron and Sanna. Thank you for taking the time to break this down for us. First off, what sectors of the economy are getting hit the hardest

so far due to the coronavirus outbreak? Well, certainly travel and business, travel, leisure, travel, um, restaurants, retail, anything that is a really consumer oriented is getting hit quite hard. Amid expectations that as as various cities and states around the country declare states of emergency, or in the case of New York, shut down things like Broadway um where where the consumer directly has to go somewhere in order to have an experience or a meal. All of that

is getting just absolutely crushed. And while we're not seeing it show up immediately in the economic data, it's going to And so it's that, and it's the fact that we're now starting to see schools closed across the country, not just universities, but elementary schools and high schools. We are seeing disruptions now in workplace habits, where we're seeing split teams, we're seeing people hopefully on in an hourly wage.

We'll we'll get a backstop, but if if they have to stop going into work, you're going to have two different kinds of shocks. You're gonna have a supply shock because we have in some cases too many goods having been made, and then a drop in demand and the demand shock which could which could throw us pretty quickly into recession. There have been a lot of comparisons of what we're seeing right now to the financial crisis in two thousand seven and two thousand and eight and the

period immediately after nine eleven? Is this similar or there's some significant differences that we need to understand. In many ways, what's transpired in the last three and a half weeks four weeks is really a combination of multiple different events. And in some ways this resembles the crash of seven

and for its speed and ferocity. In some ways it resembles um what we saw at the end of two thousand and and and then subsequently nine eleven, and in some ways, and it's not quite there yet what happened in two thousand and eight and and there are different types of events. But what we're seeing here is what we call an external shock uh that's affected the global economy, starting in China, working its way across the world and

hitting US. And so we saw a drop in production of everything from auto parts to cell phones to even pharmaceuticals. In China, you saw most of Asia go through severe quarantines and production shutdowns. And now here at home, we're going to go through a similar series of events and the markets responding to what is likely to be a severe markdown in growth estimates and a very severe markdown in corporate profits. And it's had to immediately reprice as

this coronavirus has inten sified. And part of the problem too, is that we have not yet had an adequate healthcare policy response in the United States. We haven't seen the government yet agree on a measurement set of measures that will support the economy. Now, the Fighter Reserve came in this week and added in excess of a trillion dollars of liquidity to the markets because we saw earlier in the week a wholesale selling of almost every asset that

you could find. People were selling treasury bonds, they were selling muniscible bonds in addition to stocks, gold, and oil. And when that happens, when you get that kind of panic, and I would argue that Wednesday and Thursday probably constitute a crash in stock prices down about six in two days, that you need some sort of intervention to to save

the system. And the system is not in jeopardy like it wasn't two thousand eight, but we're starting to see some strains, particularly in the credit markets, that that could cause further problems for the financial system itself down the road. We're talking to CNBC contributor Ron Insana here on I Heart Radio. Why are we seeing the market down quadruple digits one day, but then sometimes it finishes up quite

a bit the next day. This yo yo effect we've seen, well, it's it's pretty obvious now that we're having fallen about from its most recent all time high, that the markets in what they call bear face. It is a bear market. And just like in a roaring bull market, you get corrections that are short, sharp and scary, in bear markets, you get rebounds that they like to call rather ghoulish term, but a rip your face off rally. It maybe one, you know, one piece of good news and suddenly everybody's

been short the market they have to cover. Market snaps back right in your face, and and it takes everybody by surprise. And it's really more of a selling opportunity

than it is anything else. Just as corrections in an ongoing bull market are buying opportunities, we're certainly not in that mode right now and and again, and unless, or until we see what what you want to call them, Manhattan Project, Martial plan, kitchen sink response to these sets of problems we're facing right now, it's unlikely that the market will fully stabilize. We've done financial crisis before. We

know how to do that. What we don't know really is how to deal with an external shock like this. And and everyone's hoping that medical experts and scientists and others would would have their hands on the wheel and would be unimpeded by the administration in designing a set of protocols that would would deal with this problem adequately

and quickly. So not only would have minimized the human toll, but it would also minimize the economic toll that it's likely to take over the next three to six months. For those who have investments in the market and are wondering what to do with all of this volatility, what would you tell them? Well, as as we and some of my colleagues at the NBC Offen say, panic is not a strategy. Um And And here's where it comes down to the length of time that you have to

be invested. If you're ten or twenty years or fifteen ten, fifteen, twenty years or longer away from retirement, there is nothing to do. Um. You just kind of ride this out. You want to make sure that you own high quality companies, or that you own high quality bonds if those are in your portfolio. High quality assets of any kind um and and then you write out the storm. If you have anything that is questionable, it's probably a good time

to just jettis in that stuff. Maybe a little late, but again this this could get worse before it gets better. But typically financial advisors tell their clients is that if you have short term money in the market that's going towards a you know, down payment on a house or mediate turn needs for a child's education, it never should have been there in the first place, So that money just gets stripped out of the market and put aside,

even if you have to take now loss. But again, and you know, there's no period in history in which the market hasn't been the higher ten years later than it is today. There's one actually from the crash of twenty nine. The now heaked in September of that year at three. It plunged in the July of ninety two, and it plunged a forty one, which is the price at which had opened in eighteen ninety six. We did not see three eight one again until nineteen fifty four.

So there was one twenty five year period in American history where it took that long to go from the all time high and twenty nine to recapture that level uh in nineteen fifty four. That's the only time in history that's been true. Now, had you bought anywhere along the way throughout the decline, you would have done five if you had the money, and this was during the

Great Depression. But but again, if you have a long term time horizon, particularly if you're young, you should probably be throwing a fair amount of your money at the market. Now it may go down further, but you'll be buying a discounted prices here. And as as as if you're in your thirties, this is kind of where you step up and buy with both hands. That actually leads me to my final question, and again we're talking to CNBC

contributor Ron Insana right here on I Hear Radio. Are there fine ancial opportunities that people could take advantage of at the moment? There probably are, But this is one of those environments where there's no need to rush. I mean, if you're trying to catch the bottom tick in a falling market, professionals aren't even good enough to do that.

So yeah, I mean, you may want to sharpen your pencils, you may want to take out a pad of paper and look at companies that you love, UM, that have long term prospects, very solid balance sheets, that are going to eventually recover from the sell off, and be prepared to buy. But if you don't catch the first five percent of the rebound or we have you know, kind of a double dip in the market, there is no rush. You can start adding little bits of money to those

companies and average in. As we like to say, you don't take if you had a hundred thousand dollars, for instance, you don't put it all in tomorrow. You might put in eight thousand dollars a month over the course of a year in order to kind of smooth out the price at which you purchase the stocks you like or the indexes or et s that you like. So no rush, take your time. Quality is key. That's both in terms of the stock market and in terms of the bond market.

You should know what you own at all times, and UM no reason to to to just go headlong into this.

I suspect this volatility may go on for a time yet, until we know more about the spread of the coronavirus, until we know more about the human toll and the economic impact it seems unlikely that we're quite out of the woods yet, so no rush to buy, but you can nibble over time, which would probably be a strategy for those people who are trying to pick up some bargains in the wake of what has been a a pretty pronounced decline in stock this the decline on Thursday

was the biggest single day percentage decline we've seen since the crash. CNBC contributor ron in Sona, Ron, thank you so much for your time and expertise. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me, a big thanks to all of our guests, and of course to all of you for listening to Coronavirus Explained. I'm Ryan Gorman on I Heart Radio.