Health committee  I think we're doing it right now. We've shown how to do it. We're getting very good at the new normal, which is the physical distancing between people to avoid these things. As I said before, hand sanitizers aren't necessarily a problem if they're alcoholized. People washing their hands, washing door handles, and all sorts of things that are happening much more in our institutions than they used to is the way to prevent the infection.

Health committee  That's a really good point. We don't know the answer yet. Everything is theoretical. On the one hand, we're concerned about selecting for more drug resistance, but on the other hand, because everyone is all of a sudden washing their hands properly and wearing masks while out and about doing their grocery shopping, the amount of contact that people would normally have with other organisms is decreasing.

Health committee  Certainly. The best way to do that is to use hand sanitizers that have alcohol, and not other compounds that have the ability to select for drug resistance. As far as we know, alcohol-based hand sanitizers have no effect at all on selection for resistance. Those are the ones we should be using.

Health committee  I'd be very happy to, and again, let me reiterate how grateful I am that we were able to get that money out very quickly, as both other witnesses mentioned. You were talking about collaboration earlier. This is a collaboration between a virology lab headed by Dr. Matt Miller in our institute, as well as a human cellular biologist, Dr.

Health committee  Certainly you raise a really important point. That is, as health care workers move between facilities, they take with them any organisms that are on them, any bacteria or viruses that they happen to be in contact with, and they can transfer them to other spots. This is one of the big challenges with antibiotic resistance, in that these bacteria can move around on people and on other surfaces.

Health committee  Again, I apologize for the technical problem. I was making the point that to be prepared for the next challenges in infectious diseases, we need to invest and develop a vibrant community of scientists, clinicians, engineers and social scientists who will dedicate their careers to solving our current problems and the ones that we know will emerge.

Health committee  Thank you very much for the invitation to speak here. The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing what we in the field have known for decades—that is, despite the tremendous advances in medicine over the past century, we remain highly vulnerable to infectious diseases. We knew this because of the lessons of other pandemics, epidemics and outbreaks that we experienced in recent memory.