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Feb 27th, 2020
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  1. English transcript (by me, native German but not native English, so no gurantee for error-freeness).
  2. I tried to focus on the content and didn't translate word for word, e.g. I put "welcome" instead of the "let me wholeheartly welcome you",
  3. hope that makes it a little easier to read.
  4.  
  5. start at 3:28 in the video, after checking watch (Germans, have to love them xD)
  6.  
  7. S. Glasmacher:
  8. Yeah, I think we start, it's ten o'clock. Welcome to the first press briefing concerning the new Corona virus.
  9. We will offer this every working day [Mo-Fr] henceforth, meaning unless you hear differently, it will happen daily.
  10. I'd also like to welcome the watchers and listeners on twitter, we are live-streaming this,
  11. and the viewers on Phoenix [a German news channel],
  12. that, as far as we know, are also live-streaming this.
  13. Some points regarding the structure:
  14. We have here Prof. Wieler, president of the Robert Koch institute, and Prof. Schaade, vice president of the Robert Koch institute.
  15. Mr. Wieler will open with a short statement, afterwards you will be free to ask questions; at the end we might
  16. allow individual statements, and of course Mr. Schaade will also answer then.
  17. Mr. Wieler, please.
  18.  
  19. Prof. Wieler:
  20. Thanks Ms Glasmacher. Dear everyone from the press and the ones watching the live-stream, welcome.
  21. First, I'll quickly summarize what happened in the last weeks to show you that this is a very dynamic incident
  22. and that we are dealing with a virus that we only know for a short time and where we get new informations about almost daily.
  23. This is why it is so important to give this assessment of the situation every day.
  24. On December 8th, in Wuhan, a big city in China in the province of Hubei, we saw the first cases of people
  25. suffering from pneumonia, where it wasn't clear what exactly they got.
  26. On December 31st, cases were officially reported to the WHO.
  27. On January 1st, a market, an animal market, was closed down in Wuhan.
  28. Already on January 7th, the virus DNA was decoded and the information shared with the world,
  29. allowing the development of a test for the virus.
  30. This was a very, very important step and happened very fast.
  31. On January 13th, we had the first case outside of China, since then these cases are increasing.
  32. In Germany, we recorded the first case on January 27th, in Bavaria.
  33. To give you a short idea about how intensively the Robert Koch institute is working on these cases:
  34. On January 6th, we established a "situation workgroup" ["Lage AG" in German],
  35. meaning that colleagues intensively worked on that, gathering information,
  36. sharing information with international organisations, making risk assessments.
  37. On January 14th, we first introduced a coordinating position [as in "someone responsible for that"],
  38. meaning an in house scaling and putting more people on this topic,
  39. more intensely researching the topic, exchanging informations, doing daily risk assessments.
  40. From the day of the first German case, 01/27, i.e. about 4 weeks ago, we activated our situation
  41. room/assessment center ["Lagezentrum" in German],
  42. meaning that since when workers are working on it in two shifts, seven days a week from 8am to 9pm,
  43. continuously discussing, developing recommendations,
  44. are in contact with doctors, with epidemic ministers of the federal states ["Länder' in German],
  45. updating the website that we also actualize daily.
  46. You are well aware what happened in Bayern, at the first German case:
  47. All in all we have 14 people who are, save one, all discharged already; the last one is not discharged yet
  48. as they are still releasing viruses.
  49. Then we had two citizens of Wuhan, they too are healthy and discharged.
  50. Each day we re-assess the risk, we observe what happens in other countries, cases arising, how things are developing.
  51. Until the evening of two days ago, that was what was going on in Germany,
  52. since that evening we have further cases in NRW and Baden-Würtemberg.
  53. In B-W, we have a 25 year old male that traveled to Milan; related to this journey and in his proximity there were further cases.
  54. In NRW, we as of now have 6 cases, originating from a male between 40 and 50 who showed symptoms and is
  55. currently being treated at a hospital in Dusseldorf.
  56.  
  57. What happens if you have such cases?
  58. The local health governments start an intensive "contact tracing", as we call it,
  59. meaning that of course these persons get treated if sick, they are obviously quarantined,
  60. either at home or in hospitals. But one of the most important things is to find and inform contact persons
  61. to put them under quarantine.
  62. Meaning this is the task we are working on, we are calling that "containment" strategy, meaning we will try
  63. to stop the spread of this infection as much as possible.
  64. This is the goal of our current actions.
  65. This incident is very dynamic, world-wide we have 46 countries affected so far. Almost every day in the last few weeks,
  66. another new country was added; a very dynamic incident
  67. that we need to monitor and include into our risk assessment.
  68. All of us, in all countries, take every possible effort to reduce the spread of this virus as much as possible,
  69. resp. slowing down the spread as much as possible.
  70. Why is that so important?
  71. Because this virus is that new, there is not yet a treatment and no vaccine, it is important to learn more every day;
  72. how to better treat patients, how the virus is transmitted and
  73. how we can contribute to slowing down the spread and contain the virus as far as possible. We need to gain time,
  74. and we do everything we can for that.
  75. Of course we cannot exclude the possiblity of the virus spreading further.
  76. This was my statement so far, I am open for questions.
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