Birx: 'It's giving us hope of what our future can be'

Dr. Deborah Birx on Sunday spoke about the declining numbers of new coronavirus cases and deaths in Spain and Italy. She believes it can offer hope to the United States.

Video Transcript

DEBORAH BIRX: As you can see from the hopeful signs in Italy and Spain, where we see, finally, new cases and deaths declining, it's giving us hope of what our future could be.

We wanted to give you an update on where all of the states were. We're looking at this as states normalized per 100,000 citizens. It looks very similar to last week. We wanted to update you. We've been covering throughout the week the states that were moving on this map.

You can see very clearly where New York is as a state, although this is very much still centered in the New York metro area. New Jersey is the orange line. The green line is Louisiana. That's followed by Massachusetts, and then Connecticut and Michigan are together in those lines towards the bottom. And then, of course, Washington D.C. is now visible on this map, which was not visible before.

And the yellow line towards the bottom is Washington State.

Next slide, please.

So this just summarized all of the states we're tracking very closely at the county level. So we're-- we're tracing and tracking not only the epidemic at the state level, but understanding what's happening in county by county with new cases and, of course, also the deaths. We're also triangulating that with all of the laboratory data.

And just to tell you how we're kind of doing that, for New York, which you can see at the top, their serology is now about 36% positive. They were in the 40s. So day over day, they're percent positive is finally starting to decline. New Jersey's is increasing, however. They're now up to 42% of the specimens that come to the laboratory are positive.

Louisiana, 25%; Massachusetts, 20%; Connecticut and Michigan, 20%; District of Columbia, 15%; Washington, 8%; and then Illinois, Colorado are at about 16%. Pennsylvania, which is also new to the graphic, is at about 12%.

Next slide, please.

So if we could go back one. I'm sorry. If we go back one slide. One more.

All of the states here-- those are 38 of the states-- 38 of our states have less than 50 cases per 100,000. They are testing. Their laboratory results are consistent with that. Their seropositivity rate for their laboratories are less than 5%.

I think the most important thing right now is when we were talking about why we are hopeful. We're hopeful because last time I was here, I wasn't able to really tell you that Italy and Spain were coming across their apex and coming down the other side. And I think, to me, that's extraordinarily hopeful. They just completed four weeks of really strong mitigation.

And I think that's our word to the American people, is we can look like that. Two other countries look like that now-- two other countries with a very similar experience to our experience, with higher case numbers and higher mortality.

So that's what the promises is. The promise is If we do this, we could potentially be better.