HOW WELL WE ARE FIGHTING COVID-19?

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V23 2020 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 23, Number 28, July 12, 2020, Article 17

In March as we began this coronavirus journey, I published a short excerpt from an interview with my old friend Dr. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox and has fought flu, polio, and blindness. WIRED magazine has published a follow-up interview asking his thoughts on how well we as a society have responded to the challenge. Here's a short excerpt, but be sure to read the complete article. Here's one talking head who actually knows what he's talking about. -Editor

It seems like the longer it goes, the less we know about it. Every week something new comes up that contradicts what we thought we already knew.

No, no—you know a lot more about it now than you did three months ago. Yes, there are absolutely more questions today than there were 100 days ago. But part of that is because we're getting more sophisticated in our ability to ask questions. Three months ago, we had only had a couple hundred cases of this novel virus. We have now got over 11 million cases, and a half a million deaths globally. The virus has been speeding along at an exponential speed, but so has science. So now we can begin to understand that this virus attacks the circulatory system, it attacks the vascular and nervous systems, it attacks the respiratory system, it attacks our ability to bring in oxygen. That's why people can go to the hospital and be on their phone, not in any respiratory distress, but have oxygen saturation in the 50s, which in the old days we'd think of as you're near death.

Yet you say we've made progress. How much better are my odds of survival than they were three months ago?

Number one, you're better off because you're three months closer to a treatment or a prevention. Number two, the treatments are getting better, so the outcomes in hospitals are getting better. We already have convalescent plasma [with antibodies from recovered Covid-19 patients] that's doing an amazing job. And number three, depending on where you live, by flattening the curve, it is far less likely that you would have died in a corridor in a hospital because there was no room in an ICU, or there was no oxygen to give you. But I think now almost 100 percent of all the ICU beds in Phoenix are full.

OK, we know to wear a mask. But should we still be swabbing everything with Clorox?

The virus does not exist very long in fomites. I mean you're talking about a very small percentage of cases that are caused by the pencil, the toilet seat—asterisks on toilet seats, because if you don't have a cover on the toilet seat, and somebody who's got Covid takes a poop, you create an aerosol so that can spread. But if you look at the things that we worried about, like the Amazon box that comes to the door, the fact that the virus can do that doesn't mean it does do that. I don't scrub my groceries at all. If an Amazon box comes, I open it right away. I'm mostly worried about face-to-face transmission by somebody you have had a conversation with, or you're stuck in an elevator with, or you're seated next to somebody at a rock show or at a bar. I don't go do any of those things. I don't go to lectures, I don't go out.

Yes. Two of my friends who worked on Contagion got Covid. Ian Lipkin, who, along with me, was one of the senior scientists on the movie, was in China investigating Covid in January, and then he came back to the US under quarantine. He did not get infected in China, but he got really, really sick in New York City. He is a month and a half recovered from it. And Scott Z. Burns, who was the screenwriter for Contagion, just got out of the hospital yesterday in LA.