The first morning after the fires, I drove to Salem, Oregon. As I was driving, there's

this dense smoke cloud. There was a moment of knowledge that I'm driving into something.

Wildfires have been raging throughout the American West. In fact, this is one of the worst

wildfire seasons in history. And on top of trying to contain the spread of the fires,

emergency responders have also had to battle with containing the spread of the coronavirus.

The Red Cross, we're the nation's sheltering lead. We get to call it 1 o'clock in the

morning, 2 o'clock in the morning from the local fire department or the local police department

saying, hey, there's some people that need to place the state of life.

Dale Kunz is the regional chief executive officer for the Cascades region of the American Red

Cross, which includes Oregon and parts of Washington State. As the fires spread, Dale

had to quickly coordinate shelters for the hundreds of thousands of people in Oregon who were under

potential evacuation warnings or orders. And he needed to do it all while following COVID

health guidelines. Disasters are stressful situations. Inside the Red Cross, we sort of have

this, you know, saying if you've been to one disaster, you've been to one disaster.

The idea that like each situation is unique, each group that you're trying to work with is unique.

So this system that we had had really, really well designed and had trained tens of thousands

of people across the United States and how to set up these shelters, we needed to retrain all of

those people because COVID has different rules. So how do you help evacuees while also practicing

physical distancing? How do you continue testing for COVID when the air quality is so poor that

people have to stay inside? How's all of this going to impact the spread of the virus?

Today's show is about the collision of these two major events in the state of Oregon.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. And this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

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