On Tuesday, the World Health Organization reported that the global mortality rate for COVID-19 may be even higher than it had been previously believed.

About 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died.

By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.

So how does the public begin to parse the often mixed messaging surrounding the possible pandemic?

On Tuesday the 25th, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization

and Respiratory Disease, famously told reporters in a telephone press briefing,

Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country.

It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather

more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will

have severe illness. When she warns of possible community spread, she's referring to the spread

of an illness for which there is no known source. On Wednesday, the 26th, the first possible case of community spread in the U.S.

was reportedly detected in California.

Also on Wednesday...

I'm going to be putting our Vice President, Mike Pence, in charge,

and Mike will be working with the professionals and doctors and everybody else that's

working. The team is brilliant. So with the coronavirus response under new leadership, Thursday

the 27th came and went without a telebriefing from the CDC. No, Thursday was a very strange day, given the briefing that had come on Tuesday.

I'm sitting with editor and reporter Elizabeth Kim, who's been covering the virus for the Gothamist,

a New York City news outlet produced here at WNYC.

Tuesday's briefing, after that briefing, the headline that I saw in many places was

straight from Dr. Nancy Messonnier, this might be bad.

Every reporter had the expectation that the CDC would hold a briefing, because that has been

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