Sen. Mike Braun: No reason for Hoosiers to panic over coronavirus

U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., held a news conference Tuesday after meeting with Vice President Mike Pence about the coronavirus.

16 News Now's Lauren Moss spoke to him on a call from Washington, D.C., and he said it's important to keep the coronavirus in perspective and there's no reason for people in Michiana to panic.

"When you put it into perspective, in a normal flu year, we have millions of cases with somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 deaths from the flu," he said. "When it spiked a few years ago, it got up to as high as 60,000, 70,000 deaths. And you can put that into perspective, even though its early in the process here.

"The fact that it originated in such an explosive way and we saw it all and you were kind of waiting when it was going to get here, had the individuals affected that were on the cruise ship – it's very, very low risk that anyone is going to acquire that virus."