We know it's going to take time, ... It's requiring a lot of patience on everyone's part to get through this.

We will do everything we can to help quench it at its source.

You may see the mortality rate go up -- but that's not necessarily because SARS per se is getting worse.

So we're getting off to a bit of a slow start, ... That gives us a little more time to get those doses out there.

When you start getting the flu it's hard to distinguish it from any other upper respiratory infections so most people don't realize they have flu until past the 48 hour window.

Fortunately, this year the flu season is not off to an early start, and there is plenty of time for people to get their shots.

These are really tough problems, and we don't have an answer we can hand you in a cookbook.

We've got to get a vaccine supply that we can count on. We've got to get more and better antiviral drugs. And we've got to have every single link in our public health system as strong as it can be so we can detect this problem and do the things at the local community level that we need to do to save lives.

Local public health agencies are the front line in all of this. Preparedness, at its heart, is a local phenomenon.

This is not media hype. This is a real issue for us.

What we need to do is get them where we need them the most, that's our challenge right now, ... But we're very optimistic that the seniors and very young children and those who need the doses will be able to get them.

We still have no capacity to predict where it's going.

I don't think we were expecting it to be so dramatic so quickly this year. We just didn't feel it was responsible to wait three more days during a holiday weekend to let clinicians know.

We know the virus is changing. We're watching little mutations occur all the time -- that's what flu viruses do.

We remain sobered by the ongoing transmission in Hong Kong, China and probably Singapore.

Even though we're hoping that we're past the peak for this early phase of the season, in past years we have seen flu come back, ... And we've also seen new strains emerge late in the season. So it's still important to be vigilant.

We're doing the same thing others are doing. We have to look at opportunities for us to invest resources to have the best possible impact and at some programs that have been around for long time that may not be doing as well.

Hope is not a strategy. We have to plan.