Roy Blunt: “I want to talk for a few moments about where we are with the coronavirus response and the supplemental. I think all…”

“I want to talk for a few moments about where we are with the coronavirus response and the supplemental. I think all Senators will have an opportunity to be updated again today. This is not a new place for us to be. This time last year, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies held a hearing on emerging threats, and at that point we were experiencing the second largest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, antibiotic resistance was a global danger, and there was a flu outbreak bigger than we had seen in a long time. So 1 year later, we are still fighting the Ebola outbreak in the DRC, antibiotic resistance continues to be a global problem, and, according to Dr. Tony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the flu we are seeing this year is shaping up to be one of the worst in decades. Several thousand Americans die every year from the flu--usually, at least 35,000, sometimes as high as 75,000. I think about 350,000 Americans have died from the flu in the last decade. We are now facing a new danger--the COVID-19 danger. That is the new coronavirus that we hadn't seen before. As we learned with Ebola, patient zero, who doesn't know they even have this yet, can board a plane or a cruise ship, and they can be in another country or even in another continent in a matter of hours. This lesson is, once again, reinforced.…”