With more than 155,000 Americans dead and the new coronavirus spreading through america’s gigantic offices, USA TODAY’s editorial board spoke Monday with Dr. Larry Brilliant, a leading epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox. Brilliant, 76, is chairman of the Advisory Board of Ending Pandemics and CEO of Pandefense Advisory. Questions and answers have been changed for longer duration, clarity, and fluency:
Q. The United States accounts for 4% of the world’s population, but more than 22% of reported deaths. We live in a country with some of the world’s largest doctors and scientists. Then why is it so hard for us to get together?
A. It is an insect with an unattractive pandemic. Or put another way, an inconvenient moment for a pandemic in our troubled political and now electoral cycle. The growing number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths are noted through the Trump administration, rightly, as related to the decline in the number of polls. As a result, there has been so much denial, obfuscation, distraction, inattention and traps on disposable lines. We all need to join our president, yet there is an obvious lack of leadership, unprecedented in my life.
Q. A state-by-state painting in an epidemic like this?
A. Traditionally and historically, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken control. We deserve to have had a federal plan a long time ago. We deserve that all of our national leaders have covered that. He deserves to have encouraged everyone to wear masks, practice social estrangement and wash their hands. And we deserve to have made surveillance and containment, which we now call testing, tracking and isolation, transparent, was the right approach. It’s just a smart epidemiology.
Q: How would you describe what existed in the United States?
A. We had the epidemic of the East Coast and the West Coast. Then it merged into New York. And then, all of a sudden, he gave the impression in the states that had been the unstoppable highs in the South. Then California caught fire. And now he’s going in the Midwest. This polka dot blow will be the long term of this epidemic.
Q. Do schools reopen?
A. I need schools to be open as much as everyone else. But when I look at a school, especially a high school, a high school or a school, I look at an indoor cafeteria, an indoor gym, an indoor pool, interior locker rooms, an indoor theater, which you added to young people. And the incorporation of young people does not make this position safer. So open many schools, right after Labor Day and enter the flu season, then the stupid political season Array … I think we’re on a rough road.
Q. Are there promising advances in therapeutics?
A. I think there is smart news about convalescent plasma (as a remedy for COVID-19). And monoclonal antibodies. In fact, I’m sure it will be the criminal release card that will allow us to drive progress.
Q. Testing is a problem, isn’t it?
A. We have checks that have 20%, 30%, 40% false negatives. Which is scary. We don’t have a check checker. But apart from the verification part, we’re doing really well with the antivirals. We’re making very smart progress towards monoclonal antibodies. And with the vaccines, I think we’re fine. Then it’s not all dark and dark. But if we need to make a difference in the next 3 months, what we’re doing is what counts.
Q: What do you expect when schools open in person?
A. I think a lot of schools will be able to open up very well. But all models say that the most vital thing in the security of an internal area that is looking to protect, whether it’s a convention, a company, a film production or a theater, is the viral load. How severe are the incidence, prevalence and mortality rates in hospitals outside this school? There will be schools located in privileged places that have a very low level that have an effect at this stage. But this virus is on the ground.
Q. Although few young people become seriously ill, do they not transmit the disease?
A. The school season has traditionally been the scene of the fall respiratory disease series. We communicate about it as the spark that triggers the American component of the flu season. Respiratory viruses begin when young people go to school and viruses in percentage then take them home. And then, a few weeks later, I’m sure you’ve had this experience: your toddlers go into kindergarten and two weeks later you get cold. Therefore, I believe that the virus will continue to grow and spread across the country that does not yet have it.
Q: Are we at the breaking point of the best storm?
A. Well, it can get bad. If the epidemic doesn’t stop, it will simply continue. Right now, perhaps 10% of American (330 million) have had the disease. This means that you have three hundred million additional consumers for this disease who have not yet purchased it.
Q: How to prevent it?
A. We want synchronized swimming. We want all 50 states to swim towards the same purpose at the same time, during the same time. That’s what’s going to stop him. And if we don’t do it before the election, the numbers (death) at the time of the election will be horrible.
Q: How do I get to a 50-state approach?
A: Even if the CDC has let us down, it has to be the CDC, it’s the CDC, maybe with other leadership. The CDC is like Mecca for every epidemiologist. I trained there. We all went back to CDC sometimes and paid homage. The CDC still has some phenomenal scientists who are repressed, repressed, overlooked. It has to come from experience and gain political strength and be accepted through each and every one.
Q: What can be achieved?
A: If you have ever noticed the water in a domain after the structure of a dam, the component that is absorbed, the water becomes very shallow. The fish are very obvious. You can see where they are. And that’s the kind of thing you get when you avoid an epidemic and take it to such low levels, so you can do a classic epidemiology without problems.
Q: How do you respond to others who think orders to dress in a mask are attacks on their non-public freedom?
A: I deserve to tell you, put your seat belts back on and not on taxpayer-funded roads, and you deserve not to pay attention to the red lights you see when you get to four. intersection because it was not involved in its funding. Look, it’s a nuisance to wear a mask. (But) compare this to the greatest generation who gave his life for freedom. The paradox is that you have to give up a little freedom to win freedom.
Q. What is the type of mask?
A: I would like to inspire a two-way mask, so that we do not have to sell the concept that the mask is just an act of charity or benevolence in this divided world. We have a transparent understanding that some masks protect you just like others. And we place the skill in this wonderful and glorious country that is ours to make enough products to lose or reasonable enough to be everywhere. A two-way mask will help us much more than a more common one-way mask.
Q. Is the virus spreading inward than outside?
A. We know that this virus does not spread when a user walks alone in Yosemite. It can load a user moment, and it is 3 meters away, and will not extend. And you can probably climb several more. We also know that your mask for eating or drinking in a crowded bar or in a place to eat or in the school cafeteria, with a low ceiling and poor ventilation, is an invitation to the virus to infect everyone.
Q: When will things return to the general or to a general appearance?
A: This virus is all over the world. He’s going to be with us. Now it’s endemic. He’ll be with us in many, many years. We will feel the effects in the coming decades. There will be vaccines, dozens of them, from five or six other countries, of different capacity. Many of them will require booster injections or one year of injection. When you get a vaccine, you don’t get rainbows and unicorns. You have a vaccination campaign.
Q. So who wins, the virus or humanity?
A. Occasionally we say that the virus travels at an exponential rate. That’s science. The virus was only one step ahead. It’s just a bunch of RNA and a big bag. And we’re smarter than that. He’s not deliberately trying to kill us. It is simply programmed through its evolutionary genomics and infects as many other people as possible. And we’re much smarter. Our science is better. And we’ll beat him once we realize ourselves.
MORE Q-R: The coronavirus experts on what to do and the U.S. reaction. To the pandemic
DIRECT LINE: Share your coronavirus story. We can comment on your feedback.