COVID-19 latest: vaccines, holiday travel, new CDC guidelines

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• Hari Sreenivasan:

  For more on the coronavirus outbreak and the response, I spoke with Caitlin Rivers, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Rivers, it seems like it's 'paint by numbers'. It's almost exactly like we predicted that there would be these surges of not just infections, but also hospitalizations and then unfortunately, deaths as well and heading into another holiday period.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  What are you looking out for?

• Caitlin Rivers:

  I am concerned that the winter holidays will intensify transmission. We saw after both Labor Day and Memorial Day that there were big surges about a month after those holidays, which is about what we would expect in terms of the epidemiology of the virus. Unfortunately, we are also already at a very high level of transmission. And so any acceleration of the outbreak would be a really grave situation to be in. And so that's why we're encouraging people to stay home for the holidays, celebrate on Zoom, find other ways to get together, just because we want to keep, keep each other and our families safe.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Especially considering the loads and strains that so many of our hospitals around the country are under right now.

• Caitlin Rivers:

  That's right. We now have over 100,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 around the country. Previous highs, even in the spring when things were quite bad, were 60,000. And so we're well over that high watermark. And it's putting a lot of hospital systems under strain. They're having to really stretch to meet the demand. And so we really don't want to make that any worse.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Is there a false sense of confidence that might be inspired by the news, the positive news that we're hearing about vaccines? Because they're not here right now for anybody to take. I mean, it's still going to be possibly in the summer by the time most of us have access to them.

• Caitlin Rivers:

  I think it is important to recognize that although a vaccine does seem to be on the horizon and that's very exciting, we still do have a ways ahead of us. And right now we are in a particularly dangerous moment. And so although I encourage people to look ahead to that vaccine, maybe as motivation to stay committed to the mitigation measures that we're all observing to just slow the virus, it's not here yet. And so we do need to continue to be cautious.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  And the CDC revised some of their guidelines last week and that left some people concerned: well, should I be quarantining for seven, or ten days? Or, how should people be thinking about things now? Should we just kind of assume that we or other people might have it, versus trying to play this odds game?

• Caitlin Rivers:

  I think that it's a good development that CDC offered different options for shortening quarantine. It will make it easier for people to observe. And they offered supporting data that suggests that the alternate approaches are really quite safe. If you do need to quarantine, I recommend following the instructions of your local health department. But in general, I think it's a good development that we now have more flexibility for how to implement quarantine.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Are there any tests on the horizon that could make this problem a little easier to solve? Meaning, any at home tests, or, you know, I've heard of tests that might be similar to a pregnancy test that we could be taking at home and have results within 15 minutes–because testing, testing, testing seems to still be one of the bottlenecks here. Even though we're doing a lot more testing, we don't have it as widespread where people can make informed choices on how to travel or how to go to the office or how to interact with others.

• Caitlin Rivers:

  Yeah, that's a great question. One of the more recent developments that started this fall is that there are tests that are more, they're cheaper, they're easier to use. They don't require a central laboratory and they return results quite quickly. They're not yet widely available. They're primarily in the hands of the state governments. But I think that will change in the coming months. And I do hope that will give people more flexibility to use testing to determine whether or not they're infected before making choices about what activities to undertake. Whether or not that will be available like a pregnancy test where you can buy it at the grocery store, buy it at the pharmacy and keep it at home is not clear, that's actually more of a regulatory issue than a technology issue. But if the FDA were to go that direction, I think it would be a good development.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Right now, there's also a gap in urgency. I mean, in the spring when New York was the epicenter of all of this, the nation seemed to be paying attention because it was new. And here we are now. We've got more people in the hospital, more people dying per day. And somehow I don't know if it's fatigue. I don't know what it is, but we don't seem to care as much.

• Caitlin Rivers:

  This has been a challenge. It has been such a persistent crisis that I think people have become really worn down. And it's just difficult to live in that, that heightened state for so long. But we have now had over 275,000 deaths, which is a really shocking number. If we had looked back in 2019 and learned that the year ahead held that kind of mass casualty, it would be absolutely stunning, and so I think it's important that we take a moment regularly to reflect on what a tragedy this has been and to redouble our efforts to slow transmission and prevent those future deaths.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, thanks so much for joining us.

• Caitlin Rivers:

  Thanks for having me.