Pushkin.

Well, I'm going to take you back to 2005, the winter, November, December of 2005.

In 2005, the team was just assembled to begin writing the National Plan.

This is a doctor named Carter Metcher.

The team he's talking about was in the Bush White House, and the National Plan was for what to do in a pandemic.

Back in 2005, the White House asked Carter to help answer a big question.

How do you minimize disease and death between the time a new virus starts to spread, and the time we might have a vaccine for it?

You know, an analogy we use is fire, and thinking of the exponential growth in a fire just like an epidemic grows exponentially, a fire grows exponentially.

Slow a fire and you give yourself a chance to put it out.

Slow a pathogen, and you buy time to save lives.

Because you can stock up on medical supplies.

Learn about the new disease and how to treat it.

Before lots of people get sick, Carter Metcher really wasn't a political guy.

He was just an ICU doctor with a reputation for thinking about problems in unusual ways.

The White House had called him up totally out of the blue, and at that moment, it was not at all obvious how to slow a new virus, especially a virus that can spread through people without symptoms.

Public Health experts still had the year 1918 in mind.

Back in 1918, different American cities had tried various ways to slow down the Spanish flu.

They closed saloons and churches and ban large gatherings. None of it seemed to make any difference.

Carter teamed up with another doctor brought in by the White House, and oncologist named Richard Hatchett.

Together, Carter and Richard went back and looked more closely at what had actually happened back in 1918.

And so, what we began doing was pulling daily newspaper accounts from a number of cities to be able to identify when they were reporting their first cases, when interventions were being implemented.

The two doctors were looking for what they called NPI's or non-pharmaceutical interventions.

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