GUPTA: “Good morning, Mika. Absolutely. If you’re a college student, I’m going to get straight to advice here. If you’re a college student shelter in place for at least seven days once you arrive and — and you’re with your loved ones, at least seven days. Testing is constrained across the country right now, so you can’t test your way out of or into safety here. You just have to mask up when you’re home, try to quarantine for at least that seven-day window and try to get that lab-based PCR test through a drive-thru at that point so you can give yourself and your family members a sense of relief. For everybody else those just traveling for a few days for Thanksgiving, cancel your plans. And I’ll be more clear here, there’s been a lot of shades of gray here, a lot of uncertainty in the science of Covid-19, in this case cancel your plans. Over the weekend I can’t tell how many calls I received, Mika, from friends of friends, of loved ones, in the ICU anywhere from 20 to 80 years of age. I heard in Texas they’re rationing plasma, I’ve heard this form a close source there. I’ve heard that pulmonologists, critical care docs, are at [indecipherable] to getting live saving care. This is now the big issue. We are in a five alarm fire. You should not be traveling. There’s time to cancel your plans. There is no off ramp here. There is no ICU bed that’s going to be staffed here reliably throughout the country. This is reality right now. This is not some existential reality. Cancel your plans if you absolutely do not need to travel somewhere.”
BRZEZINSKI: “And so Dr. Dave, I’d like to emphasize the same advice because if you’re having a group of 12 or more, whether or not they’re traveling or not, that’s 12 or more people who’ve made a number of decisions based on their own personal safety. And I — in terms of advice for the holiday, I mean, a lot of people don’t have space to quarantine for five to seven days. Is it worth making the trip?”
CAMPBELL: “No. Dr. Gupta nailed it and what’s important to remember is this is a numbers game. The more people you’re around, the closer you are to them, the more likely one of them will spread the virus to others. And there’s no magical cure, we know that from the information you spoke about earlier with prevention and treatment options that are — that are coming every day. But you have to prevent the disease in the first place and what we have available today to do that and through the Thanksgiving holiday to do that is to limit the spread of this virus from one person to another. And what a horrible legacy of a Thanksgiving if you gather, whether you’re even within your immediate family, and somebody gets sick a few days or a week or two later and you can clearly look back and see that all you needed to do was either cancel the vacation, cancel the Thanksgiving or limit the number of people, do it outside and wear your mask. I think of all the information and advice that we keep hearing over and other again, wearing a face mask while inside your own home around anybody else still makes sense and it will continue to make sense all the way through the spring, through the summer as we see the number of people presumably getting vaccinated increase and as we see the number of therapeutics increase for monoclonal anti-bodies, to plasma, to Dexamethasone, to whatever comes down the road next. But for the short term, Dr. Gupta nailed it.”
BRZEZINSKI: “We are getting there.”
CAMPBELL: “Cancel, cancel, cancel. And if you cannot or will not, limit, limit, limit.”