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You've said that you expect our current pandemic to have five phases. Could you explain what those are, and where Houston and Texas are on that timeline?

The first phase is containment. That's when we try to keep the virus from entering our area and try to keep it from spreading in the community.
Containment really started at the end of January, when the United States declared a public health emergency, and the president imposed traveled travel restrictions and travel bans from China. That was to try to slow the spread of the virus from China into the United States. And it did.

That's where our public health authorities ramped up their capability to identify patients, isolate and care for them, and also do contact tracing.
But clearly, some time late February, the U.S. had an inflection point: "community spread." Once we had widespread human transmission in the United States, it overwhelmed the ability of public health to do individual, case-by-case containment.
So we transitioned from Phase One, containment, to Phase Two, mitigation. We are clearly in the mitigation phase now.
The primary purpose of mitigation is to slow the spread of virus within our communities. What you're seeing now is a lot of activity to try to prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed caring for those patients who get really, really sick from COVID.

That is the purpose of the aggressive social-distancing measures, like closing schools, universities going to distance learning, asking that people avoid large gatherings, closing businesses except for essential functions.
We've also seen action to mitigate the virus's economic impact to provide economic relief and keep people employed.

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