What Do You Need to Do to Survive Coronavirus? | Ask Mr. Wonderful #22 Kevin O'Leary
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Hi, everybody. I started to do some work on this week's Ask Mr. Wonderful and went into the database to start listening to the questions from all around the world. Clearly, this is an extraordinary situation because everybody is concerned about the pandemic of the coronavirus—how it's affecting the families, how it's affecting their businesses, how it affects them, and how to fix their jobs.
So, I've got hundreds of questions on this. Here's what I've decided to do: rather than try and just pick one or two or three or four, even, I've kind of got the themes of all these hundreds of questions and I've tried to pick one in each genre, and we're gonna talk about it. But let me tell you what I want to do for this week, because I think this is really important.
I'm sitting isolated now in Miami; I've decided to stay here and ride this out in our home here. We have kids in different cities, and my wife has traveled to be close to them, so we're trying to keep our family together. Everybody's trying to figure this out in their own way, and clearly, health is paramount. Listening to the advice from doctors and the government and everything else about social distancing, but basically, I'm looking out at the ocean right now at an extraordinary scene that I've never seen in my whole life.
We're in the middle of March break. This is a time when there are hundreds of thousands of people on the beaches of Miami, and there isn't a single person even walking on the beach. [Applause] It's very eerie just to see it. I mean, nobody! And that's because the police have told everybody that you cannot go on the beach, and they've made sure you don't have access to it anymore.
People are concerned, obviously, about the coronavirus, but it's kind of a unique situation. I've decided here to stay and work. You can see it's a mess; I'm dealing with all of my companies and my investments. I've spent a lot of time speaking to them every day. I'm pretty well locked in here. I go out, you know, once a week to go get some groceries, and I take an electric bike to do it. I don't want to get in the car. You know, I should show you this.
Unlike everybody else trying to figure out, you know, do I wear a mask? I've got one! You know, it's just a strange different way to live. Yeah, I've been using it, and gloves and everything else. But we're all in this together. So, I thought I'd spend this week talking about it, and I've decided to do something else as well.
I've asked a couple of doctors to come on the show this week—I'm going to bring them in by Zoom—and I want you to hear what they've told me. I've got Dr. Sahlman from Boston, who is a very good pragmatic doctor about how to live within the context of the fear of catching this virus, how you should conduct your life around it, and what you do with family and how you travel.
But I've also brought a very special guest, Dr. David Kennedy. I'm going to be talking to him, and you're going to hear what he has to say. He was the doctor, the respiratory specialist at Ground Zero for SARS. He's lived through this, and he's now doing exactly the same thing with the coronavirus. He's in the hospital; he's dealing with it. He understands the nature of a pandemic like this, and he has some very interesting observations about this particular virus and what we should and can learn from him. It's gonna be very interesting!
So, those are my two guests on this show; we're going to get to them later. But I'd like to answer some of these questions, and I think these will be relevant to everybody. So, listen to this, and let's talk about it.
"My fiance and I got laid off from a startup a week before the outbreak got really bad. No one's hiring during this difficult time, and soon many people will be in the same boat. We worked in digital marketing growing economy. Obviously, this is a time when hiring for marketers is going to stop altogether. The question is, is this a time when hiring for marketers is going to stop altogether?"
And it's a great question. And the answer is no, it's not! Companies now have to shift. I've talked to almost all of my portfolio; they're not all doing great because some of them are involved in retail, some of them are involved in products and services that have a lot to do with people getting together.
But others—their businesses are booming because they sell products and services for home offices, for example, or individual workout gyms. Everybody has different problems, but they're all trying to connect directly with their customers, and they're trying to get strategies where they can take their old retail businesses and bring them online during this period, which we don't know how long it's going to last. They're going to try and sell direct, and to do that, they need help.
I certainly believe that digital marketers that have great skill sets, who know how to work with the different platforms, are going to be very, very valuable. They're just going to have to work, like I am, from home, communicating directly with customers online. I've been doing Zoom meetings five, six, seven, eight a day with as many as a hundred people online.
It's an eerie new way to do business, but it's incredibly efficient. It's the same tool that you would be using as a marketer to help your clients, and understanding the way the algorithms are shifting on all these platforms as things change is really important. So no, I don't think you have to lose your job or be completely unemployed.
You have to find a new way to engage your customers and reach out to them, which by the way, even big companies are doing now. I don't care what business you're in—there's nobody walking on the streets, there's nobody going to restaurants. All of those companies are trying to change their strategies to survive and stay alive.
But, you know, I can't help saying it over and over again—you got to figure out some way over the next three to four months, maybe; we don't know how long it's going to be. To keep the DNA of your business intact.
Here's another question: "Working alone without coworkers or bosses around doesn't give me a sense of teamwork. Yeah, I get this one. No chattering break to boost team morale, and there's no opportunity to build rapport with clients for upcoming work. How do you stay motivated working from your home when you thrive in a social environment?"
Well, I totally get that question. I feel totally isolated here. I mean, I don't even see any people walking anywhere. What's keeping me connected is social media—it's speaking and talking to people in meetings. I've probably done six of them today using Facebook, I'm using LinkedIn, I'm using Twitter. I'm communicating to my base, companies, and social media contacts on pretty well Instagram—everything, every platform.
In that sense, being part of a community, even without having the physical contact, is something that gives me some relief, and it should be the same for you. Now, when you need to talk to a human being, I'll tell you what I'm doing in my family. I'm organizing a family Zoom every night just to check up on everybody.
"How's everybody doing? How's it going?" It's kind of a routine; we do it at 7 o'clock, and it really helps me feel that we're still together even though we're thousands of miles apart. Nobody can move. I've got my father sitting in Switzerland; he can't get in or out of there. My daughter's in New York, my wife is somewhere else right now in transit. We'll all get together tonight!
My son's also, you know, working in his engineering lab, and he's not moving anywhere right now. So, this is going to be an extraordinary time, and I think you can rely, whether you use—you know, there's so many different tools. You can Skype.
The one I am falling in love with, and I am a shareholder of the company, but that's just part of my—one of my ETFs—Zoom has come out of nowhere as a tool, and I think they've done a really good job in making that platform really easy to use. Indeed, when I invite these doctors to come on the show later, I'm going to Zoom them. You're going to see them as I record those interactions, and I think we're going to get a lot of good information on that.
But whichever one you want to choose, there you are, you're communicating with a live person, and it just feels better. But I got to admit, sitting here feels pretty weird. I’ve never actually sat— I guess the best analogy is you've got to pick your prison. You have to decide where you're gonna put yourself down for, I don't know, a month, six weeks, who knows? Pick your prison; surround yourself with whatever it is that you're gonna need to keep your sanity.
Get a good book— even go back to that. I mean, my routine is I've got a lot of laptops here, a lot of technology, a broadcast camera. I'm just keeping myself busy all day long and connecting with my companies, my entrepreneurs, and my team in my own business. It's challenging, though— I'm not gonna make light of it.
I'm doing my own shopping, and I'm cooking all my own meals. I'm not even ordering in takeout. But like, I want to lose some weight, actually, I'm cooking really lean and mean! A lot of people don't know this—I'm a pretty good cook! I'm kidding, chops, back a chef wonderful! I got to tell you—some of my more complicated dishes I’m even gonna make crème brûlée and escargot just to keep myself busy. Set the table, put a candle out, and a spot of wine dinner for one—me!
Okay, here's another one: "I'm a psychiatrist, and many of my patients asked me how to reduce their anxiety around the market and the market crash. It seems that the anxiety driven by buyers is just as bad as the economic crash itself. Thoughts or recommendations?"
This is a great question. You know, there's a whole generation of investors that have never seen a decline like this before. I've been through this multiple times, and here's what I've learned.
Listen, I'm just giving you my advice; I'm not telling you how to invest, but here's what I've learned: the market has had an extraordinary sell-off—over 30% in the major indexes in a really short period of time. We've actually self-declared a recession, even though we know the numbers to justify it yet. I'm not saying it won't come, but it's the first time in my life I've ever seen it declared, or a recession, before the numbers even justified it. That’s how pessimistic we are, and that emotion has got a lot of people selling stocks.
Now, if you’re lucky and you've been holding back a little cash, I'm not saying everybody has done this, you're putting it back to work in the market, but you can't pick the bottom. You just can't! If you have a hundred dollars, put ten dollars to work every second day, or spread it out a little bit, and you'll get some bad days and some good days.
But here's the piece of advice I want to tell you in a recovery after this—whenever it happens, there's going to be extraordinary days when huge returns are made in a few hours! 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 percent. And if you're not invested at that time, you will completely miss out.
Very often, in violent downturns, they're met later with violent upswings where the majority of returns in a whole year come in a few days. I'm not kidding, in a few days! And if you're not invested in that period, you will not get those returns.
So you got to kind of ride it out. It hurts, it’s painful, it’s emotionally stressful, but that is the nature and the volatility of markets. We've gotten so docile in the last few years that markets only going one way—up! Well, we're back in reality; volatility—that is the derivative of capitalism.
There's still no better system. We'll get through this together—we'll be building businesses. And I can tell you one thing about entrepreneurship: having lived with entrepreneurs my whole life and been one myself, right now, somewhere, somebody is solving a problem that has been created by this horrific virus and the way it's changed our lives.
That business, in a few years, will be a giant! What it is! But that's the nature of entrepreneurs; they're always trying to solve problems with services and products that they dream up to help people, and that's where value is created, and it’s gonna happen again.
I have total faith in entrepreneurship in America—it's going to happen over and over again all around the world. There are entrepreneurs in every country affected by this, working hard to solve problems for fellow human beings, and that's what I love about entrepreneurship.
Okay, let's get back to the questions. Wow! "I'm from Arizona, and my family and I own a restaurant. We had to send all our workers home and limit ourselves to just takeout business. What approach should we take? How should we manage the money we have at the time, which is right now?"
You know, I've got lots of companies in this situation. Let me tell you what I'm advising them, and we've had multiple meetings together in a time like this. Let’s just take a restaurant in a time like this. Everybody that services that restaurant understands what's going on. That includes the landlord, the staff, the food suppliers, and the cleaners—it's everybody there all together making that business work, and they all benefit from when it's working.
So, now that we're in a period of stress, it's time to share the pain. So, what I've asked my restaurant owners to do is to say, "Look, go to the landlord. Let's start there— which is often one of the biggest costs—and say, 'I've been a great tenant for years.' You know, if you've been a great tenant for years, you got to declare it now, and I'm gonna need some help. I don't have anybody coming into my restaurant anymore.'"
Now, you don't tell your landlord you're not gonna pay them ever. You ask for some leeway for some time. For example, say to them, "Look, would you give me the next two months? Could I defer rent?" You're not asking them that you're to never pay them; you're asking them to defer rent just to take the pressure off you to keep the DNA of your business going— to keep everything intact for when it comes back.
And I like to know my entrepreneurs today—let’s deal in the context of 90 days. Three months! We don’t know what's gonna happen, but we may see the other end of this mess in three months, or at least the beginning of some kind of normalcy. In China right now, the number of cases are reducing quickly; maybe we got our act together here too. Hopefully, we will.
Generally speaking, we're gonna move quickly on this one; the government resources are pouring into it. But the idea for the entrepreneur in this case, this restaurateur, is deal in terms of 90 days. Then go to your suppliers and say, "Look, can I stretch the payment for just 60 of those 90 days? Help me with my business." You're gonna be amazed how many people say, "Yeah, I can help you."
Not everybody's going to, but some. Well, then you go to your employees and say, "Look, I only have two options. I either have to lay you off, which I don’t want to do because I want to keep you in my world to bring you back when things normalize, or stagger shifts where you work one day and you don’t another on the takeout business, if there is a takeout business. Or I'll cut your salary for doing that for this period, if I can just to keep you going, just to keep you sustained."
And that's how you work together. You make it everybody's challenge because it's everybody's benefit when the business stays together. And in talking with my companies over the last 10 days on this, about 60% of them are getting relief this way. They really are! The people they work with want to help them.
That's the nature of entrepreneurship, that's the nature of working together, that's the nature of running a business. It's going to be tough; there's no question about it, but you're going to find people want to help. I wish you good luck on that one.
Alright, let's go and talk to some doctors about this. Let's get some advice. Let's start with Dr. Martin Solomon. I've known this man for decades, and I found him to be a fantastic pragmatic doctor—he's my doctor. I've asked him a lot of questions; I want to hear what he has to say. You should hear what he thinks—this is really interesting. He's taken some of the fear out of my family; he's given us great advice to think about how to deal with what's out there.
I've also got on the line Dr. David Kennedy. Now he's really interesting because he was part of the Ground Zero team during the SARS epidemic. Remember that? It broke out in China, and he can draw the analogy between what happened there and what's happening now. He's also involved in helping patients with this pandemic right now—he's a respiratory expert. We want to hear from him; we want to hear from both of them.
Look, there's so much misinformation out there, and that's why everybody's at freak-out factor six. What we need are facts. Let's get to the doctors!
So let's just start with: "How would I know I have this virus, this coronavirus? How would I know?" For many people, it doesn't manifest itself. How would I know?
So the context of that question is, you know, is this something I need to worry about?
So here's the basic element to it: most people who have coronavirus are not going to either have any symptoms or have minimal symptoms, as if they have a simple respiratory illness. The people who need to worry will know that they're sick.
For example, today one of my family members called to say, "I've got a fever of 101, aching all over, I have a terrible headache, minor cough. What do you think's going on?"
The primary symptom, or the universal symptom, and the one that typically presents in 98 percent of patients is fever. So you're going to get a fever, and you're gonna feel unwell, and you're gonna probably almost certainly develop a cough.
So, cough and fever are the hallmark symptoms. And, Kevin, keep in mind this is not an upper respiratory tract disease, so you don't have a lot—and although it can happen, things like running noses, sore throats are not the commonest presentation of this disease.
Although it can happen, most of the time it's a lower respiratory tract condition, so cough, particularly dry cough, and fever are the commonest presentations, followed by shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.
I said you've got coronavirus! But hopefully he's young and healthy, so there's no need to test for two reasons: one is because we can't get the tests unless you meet criteria, and you have to be in real respiratory distress now because there's such a shortage of tests. And the other reason not to test is most people will just get better!
So, even though we'd like to know where it is and how many cases there are, you don't need to really be terribly worried with those symptoms.
“How old was this person you’re talking about?”
48.
"So what is the real age that you should start to sweat bullets if you get a fever of 101 and you know something's wrong?"
Well, you know, fever in small children is always a concern! Very small children, infants and children under the age of one don't dissipate fever as well as adults do, so any fever in that age group is bad.
But in terms of the risk of the coronavirus, it's a concern with everybody. Until about two weeks ago, we all felt pretty comfortable that children weren't getting sick with this, but now they are! And so the disease somehow is either changing in our country or the susceptibility is different.
But anybody who develops fever and feels like they've been hit by a truck, they've got most likely coronavirus.
As the regular flu season is starting to weigh—no doubt that SARS was a disease that had a higher fatality rate, but wasn't nearly as contagious as this one is. This particular virus is even more contagious than influenza, so influenza probably 2 to 3 times more contagious.
So what is it about it? I don't think we've worked that out yet. There are certain receptors on the external surface of the virus that bind to human cells. There's something different with this coronavirus and the other ones, but the exact mechanism or the differences that cause it to be more contagious, I don't think are yet established.
So if I get the Rona—let's say I'm 48 and 50, whatever— I get hit, I got a fever, I've got Corona, I'm not even getting tested. How long am I going to be sick for? And I'm assuming I got to isolate, even if I'm all with other people. I gotta be in a bedroom by myself or something, right?
Right. So the answer to that is divided. All of these things have different approaches.
So if you have fever and body aches and you feel like you get coronavirus, but it doesn’t get any worse than that, you’re probably going to be better in five or six days. But you have to continue to isolate for at least 14 days because it takes that long for the acute illness to stop.
Now there are studies coming out of China and Italy, and I have this from people doing the major research on the vaccines, that you continue to shed virus for as much as four to five weeks afterward!
So that’s a little scary. I’m not sure what to do with that information.
"Four to five weeks, that’s viable virus? That could infect somebody else?"
Yes, yes! And we don’t know who that is—that’s a big problem! It’s a very big problem!
So I could feel great, I told her my fever is gone, I’m feeling good again; you’ve isolated for 14 days and you go outside— you could theoretically still pass it along.
It's interesting because I remember when SARS was going on, I had very vigorous discussions with my colleagues about the probability of occurring, and some of them—particularly one gentleman who was very famous in the SARS epidemic named Don Lo—Don reassured me shortly after SARS was over that it would never come back.
And the reason he gave was that there was no animal or human host for the virus, and he was actually quite correct. So a virus needs a host to sustain it and to pass it on and make it transmissible.
SARS had no human or animal host. This particular coronavirus is still too early to tell at this point—we don’t know if it’s going to recur; we don’t know if there is a sustainable human host that is going to maintain itself! So the—is there a possibility, once we get enough tests, of doing follow-along tests, so if you're still shedding virus and you don't go out—but we're not there yet? There, no!
I'm having a terrible time getting people tested right now!
So we’re America here, and we can’t get enough tests. What happened?
Yeah, we’re a third world country right now when it comes to coronavirus. We just didn’t get ready with enough tests for this.
Well, people just ignored the opportunity, you know, it’s—I don’t want to get too political, but getting rid of the pandemic office in the White House was a huge mistake. Pretending that this was just a cold for a month was a mistake, and we lost a lot of time! We could have been ready for this.
Okay, you’ve been a medical professional as long as I’ve known you. What’s your take until we’re out of this mess? Because I’m sitting here alone, sequestered in my Miami apartment in this surreal world, looking at the beach with not a single person on it—the town is a ghost town. It’s strange!
How long are we in this for?
This is very different because obviously it’s a pandemic rather than an epidemic—so pandemic implying it’s affecting pretty much most, if not all, countries across the world.
Well, we just got word in Boston that we very likely will get a seclusion order in the next 48 hours. I think that if the country really walks down for two or three weeks, we can flatten this out and get out of it— the same way the Chinese did. But I don’t see it happening!
What happened in Florida with Spring Break and leaving the restaurants open—letting this—I think it just let the cat out of the bag! I think we’re in this for the long haul.
I would be surprised it’s all summer.
And what’s a long haul?
Yeah, I would be surprised if we’re out of this by June!
June?
Yeah! And that’s really what that's producing—hitting here alone till June.
Okay, so let me ask some practical questions: I gotta eat. So, I don’t go to restaurants; I go to the Fresh Market. I have some instruments here; I have a mask; I have gloves. Should I be wearing this stuff when I go out shopping?
You don’t need to wear the mask. You should wear the rubber gloves if you’re going to be in close proximity to people on the chance that somebody might be coughing around you. You could wear the mask, but as a general rule, the mask is not going to protect you when you’re outside.
The better thing to do is actually have food delivered to you, and then to open the food, the boxes, take the food out, wash your hands, and then handle the food.
Should I wash the food? Do I have to somehow?
No, no, no! There’s no evidence that it's transmissible through food.
Okay, so, but the virus itself sitting on a surface on the box that gets filtered to me because these are kind of the pragmatic issues people are freaking out about.
I’ve got all these questions!
If people say because it—the delivery guy delivers my food, takeout food, or fresh frozen—is it on the box?
Yes! Well, it could be!
So you open the box with gloves, you throw out the packaging or dispose of it someplace, and then you take the gloves off, you wash your hands, and then you retrieve the food!
I don’t—and so I don’t have to prepare my food; I can eat a salad! I can eat fresh salad—no problem, most likely!
Yeah, I mean, it does not appear to be passing through the food chain. You know, looking back at this a year from now, we may think differently about it, but at the moment, it’s all being passed person-to-person contact.
Okay, I’ve got at least a hundred questions about regimens for bolstering my immune system—from zinc to IV vitamin C.
I’ll give you one answer: forget all that other stuff!
The only thing that’s ever been shown to reliably shorten and diminish the intensity of viral illnesses is vitamin C. And that’s been around a long time!
It’s not—it—you can’t prevent colds, but you can significantly suppress them. And I've been taking a thousand milligrams a day of vitamin C now for all two weeks. I’ve advised everybody who asks me that—that’s what they should do! And I think the evidence for that is strong!
All the other stuff—zinc and all kinds of supplements—there’s just no scientific evidence! It doesn’t mean you can’t take them, but there’s no science behind it.
But vitamin C may help to mitigate!
Okay, tons of questions about family members, younger family members coming back to visit parents and grandparents that are coming—that they kicked out of colleges now, pretty well Harvard, in your town, everywhere—they're kicked out! They’re all coming home.
Alright, here’s a question: "Should I test my 23-year-old son before I let him in the door?"
No, but it would be reasonable to sequester them for two weeks in the house—just don’t be near them. That would be a reasonable thing to do—not crazy!
Or you could take your chance. If you can’t test them, the testing is crazy; can’t get the test! But that happens all over America. There are hundreds of students coming home.
So this could, in effect, be another way it gets passed, especially the students who did crazy stuff like going to spring break in Florida.
You’re going to spread it all over the country!
Yeah, that’s a problem. They've shut the beaches down now, but it was for about a week too late!
Going back to the one thing I know people are going to freak out about what you said was—and I want to make sure we understand this—if I get it, and I survive it, and I’m feeling better, I could be shedding virus for up to three weeks!
That’s scary! But can I get it again?
Or like the flu?
Yes! So it’s unclear yet! People have immunity. The people who are making a vaccine that I’ve spoken to are just not certain about that yet! You know, there are a lot of people who get exposed to viruses and don’t get immunity!
For example, shingles—you can get shingles and then get shingles again! Now, coronavirus is a different kind of virus, so we don’t know the answer to that.
We would like to think that you can’t get it again, but I don’t think we know that yet. It’s too early in this process to know!
The other part of it is that this is just a more aggressive virus, but not all viruses are the same! This virus passes more easily, and its effects are very less—the incidence of toxicity, of severe illness, of death is higher than most of those other illnesses!
Do you know what the death rate is now in the general population? I mean, more people have still died from the regular flu in the last two years, right?
Right! But if you look at the curve of incidence, knowing what's happening—the spread of the disease—this is going to far surpass influenza within another week!
We’ll be way past April odds!
Okay, Martin, finally, is there anything you would like to say to all the people who are gonna see this that could be a little more optimistic?
Anything?
Obviously, no!
No, no! If everybody recognizes that we’re all part of this, and everybody recognizes the importance of isolation, of preventing contact with others in order to get this under control.
We can stop this illness! This is not going to be stopped with a vaccine; it’s not going to be stopped with a miracle medicine because there’s nothing going to be available for a long time! But we can stop this with isolation; it works!
And if anybody's not sure, I'm sure you've seen the graphs. Look at the graphs of incidents of illness and death from the flu illness that struck the United States a hundred and fifty years ago and the difference between St. Louis and Philadelphia. It looks like the mitigation/non-mitigation curves, and everybody's working at these days.
They’re trying to accomplish what the virus—the incidence of death and disease—in Philadelphia, where they had a fair and they didn’t restrict it at all, goes up to a very high death rate and then gradually trails. St. Louis, which immediately told everybody to stay home and stopped all social connections for a period of a couple of weeks, has a flat curve—same illness, two separate American communities, state and a half apart!
You think—I mean, if everybody sequesters and there’s no more person-to-person transmission, theoretically— like this—totally theoretically, this could be over two to three weeks!
Well, that would be great!
Okay, my policy, as we both know, is that's not going to happen. There's going to be transmission. Hopefully, the rate goes down, so that's why it's going to—I think that's why it's going to drag on into the summer.
Is the summer help kill the virus?
I think! I think on surfaces there's probably some truth to it. I mean, I don’t think viruses love cold, so if you were to take a virus and you were to say, "I want to keep this around for a hundred years because I want to study it down the road," and you're the CDC, and you want to keep your ebola or your COVID or whatever, you know, for research purposes, you freeze it!
Viruses love that; they love cold, so they’ll survive forever! So my theory of being in a really hot place where all the surfaces during the day or you know, they’re up at 90 degrees, I could—you know, if I chair out on the beach this Friday, I’d like to think that a virus has a hell of a tough time with that!
In a way, it probably does! It’s going to survive, but it’s going to survive a lot shorter period of time! But the problem, Kevin, is most of the transmission is probably not at the beach—it’s at the coffee shop, it’s at the party, it’s at the workplace, it’s at the social gatherings of whatever is tight, whether it’s church or otherwise!
It’s people are gonna get it when the temperature, not just when it’s 90 degrees, but you know, when you’re at Starbucks and you’re picking up your coffee cup and the guy happened to pass it on to you—you know, it’s 70 degrees there; it’s an air-conditioned environment!
I have one last final question, and I was saying and asked the doctor what his daily protocol is and how he interacts with his patients and then goes home. What is he doing about that?
Well, it's changing every day; it's getting more and more strict and limited. So instead of getting up in the morning and going to the hospital to make rounds—which I can't do now because I'm restricted; I'm not allowed to go into the hospital—I get up in the morning, I do my workout, and I sit down on my computer. I answer all the mail that needs to be done, and now I'm seeing patients on my computer, either virtually or using telehealth visits to communicate with them and try and deal with things.
Then we have a procedure for screening people as to whether or not they need to go in to get screened or treated, and then we have locations set up for people with non-respiratory problems where patients can be seen. So if somebody thinks they're in your office— if somebody thinks they have the virus, they don't come into your office!
No, nobody! We screen everybody out of the office. There’s actually almost nobody in the office now; mostly it’s handling phone calls and ordering tests and doing paperwork. But if somebody calls and they have a non-corona symptom— and people still get sick!
So if somebody calls for chest pain or abdominal pain, we have it set up so people can get care where they need!
Together, thank you so much for your time today. I think a lot of people will listen to this. You know, as you can imagine, the amount of angst out there has never been higher! It’s amazing we’re going through it ourselves—all of us! Everybody feels that anxiety.
And the other part of it is, I think it’s important to keep a routine going! You know, there are a lot of jokes going around on the Internet—this is me before Corona and this is me after—thin fat! Keep up a routine! You need to exercise! If you’re allowed to go out, go to get fresh air or walk—you know, try to maintain a routine for yourself because isolation can be very destructive! The emotional impact is huge!
And remember, all of us are upset and depressed about anybody who’s not upset or depressed about this isn’t paying attention. It’s okay to feel that way!
That was great information from both of them—both Kenna Wotty and Solomon said one thing that I heard and I hope you did too: do not mess with this virus! It is very, very contagious! So don’t go out! If you’re sequestering yourself with your family or by yourself, do not have the temptation—after a while—to get out there!
I was invited to a dinner party, for example, tonight. Everybody said, "Don’t worry about it! Nobody’s sick!" How about no? No, Nanette, I’m not doing that! How do they know they’re not infected? There’s a 14-day quarantine period!
I’m not messing around with this thing, and neither should you! You’ve got to have the discipline; you heard it from Solomon, you heard it from Kenna Wotty. You’ve got to make sure that you can stay focused on the objective, which is basically—don’t catch this thing!
So don’t go out if you don’t have to; don’t mingle with people you don’t know. Stay close to home, and let’s ride this thing out together! It’s been a crazy week. Stay safe. I'll see you soon!