News Room

To help people address the coronavirus outbreak with facts, not fear, WRAL News gets answers to coronavirus questions from Julie Swann, an N.C. State University professor whose research covers the spread of influenza pandemics, access to health care and disruption of humanitarian supply chains, and Lyn Fairchild Hawks, director for curriculum and instruction for distance learning with the Duke University Talent Identification Program.

While the coronavirus outbreak has stifled China’s output, the quarantine hasn’t been used long enough to empty the supply chain and rattle factories and stores in Tennessee. But that could come.

I assume I am hardly the only one having a hard time keeping focused on normal work when the coronavirus is delivering its social, health and economic whammies all around us.

In the mad dash to meet Gov. Larry Hogan’s call for 6,000 new hospital beds for a potential surge of coronavirus cases in Maryland, patients with COVID-19 could end up in a new wing, an alcove or even a tent.

The U.S. may follow in Italy’s footsteps and be overwhelmed by the coronavirus unless we take preventive action now. The capacity of the American health-care system is already under strain — even without the COVID-19 pandemic — with emergency room overcrowding, long wait times to schedule an appointment, and a chronic shortage of nurses.