Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Heim in here.

I know we're all feeling a bit concerned and maybe even confused about the flood of daily information regarding the coronavirus.

I want to help you feel more informed and I want to help you feel more empowered to take care of your own health during this time.

And that's really why I teamed up with my friend and colleague Dr. Patrick Hanaway,

who's the coordinator of the Institute for Functional Medicine's COVID-19 Task Force

for a webinar and a question-to-answer session that I wanted to share with you today is a special episode of the Dr's Pharmacy.

So here it is and thanks for tuning in.

So I'm Dr. Mark Heim in. I'm a functional medicine physician. I'm the head of strategy and innovation at Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine.

And Patrick Hanaway is a close friend and colleague. We've been both in the functional medicine realm for over a couple of decades now.

And Patrick and I started the Center for Functional Medicine in Cleveland six years ago.

And now Patrick is the advisor, senior advisor to the CEO of the Institute for Functional Medicine.

And he's the coordinator of the mid-19 Task Force for the Institute for Functional Medicine.

And we thought we'd have a Q&A on COVID because people are so confused about what's going on.

They're so distraught about different things they're hearing in the news and trying to make sense of all the confusion.

And I think as providers, as healthcare workers, we are also trying to sift through the data and separate the wheat from the chaff and make sense of what's happening, which is not easy as you can imagine.

Because there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of hype and we want to try to find out what is true, what is not true, and how to actually sort through the levels of evidence about what is out there for us to do to protect ourselves from getting COVID-19 to protect her families.

So just a background a little bit for where things are at today is April 8th.

There are one and a half million cases to date. There are a million and a half cases. There are about 419,000 of those cases in the United States.

And unfortunately, we are the number one location by far.

And there are about 87,000 deaths globally, 317,000 people have recovered.

What's interesting is that South Korea and the United States both had their first COVID-19 case on the same day.

They now have 10,000 cases. We have 419,000 cases. And that's because they were very, very aggressive and early testing in tracing of contacts, identifying contacts and cases.

...