Epidemiologists are finding themselves very much in demand at the moment.
As the world continues to be gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, governments are turning to scientists for their expertise.
Dr. Larry Brilliant was part of the team committed to eradicating smallpox in the 1970s. Since then, he has worked with Google and is currently chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics. He also worked as a senior technical adviser for the film Contagion.
So, as you can imagine, he knows a thing or two about what we’re facing.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview to WIRED, Dr. Brilliant explains that the ‘whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn’t a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when.’
He goes on to outline what some models have shown about how a virus spreads, what we can do to flatten the curve and, crucially, what’s coming down the line.
‘By slowing it down or flattening it, we’re not going to decrease the total number of cases, we’re going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there’s nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months,’ he told WIRED.
‘The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we’re only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we’re not testing enough, and we’re just blind to it, then we’re in a world of hurt,’ he told WIRED.
‘Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer.
‘And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.’
Brilliant is far from alone in suggesting that getting effective testing measures in place is the best thing we can do at this point.
Speaking on Reddit, Bill Gates along with Dr. Trevor Mundel, who leads the Gates Foundation’s global health work, and Dr. Niranjan Bose, Gates’ chief scientific adviser, said testing and vaccine development were vital to halt the spread.
He suggested the US needs to set up a central portal where citizens can go to find out about and order home-testing kits based on their symptoms and priority status – such as the elderly.
Furthermore, he wrote there are currently six different efforts going on around the world to develop a coronavirus vaccine. ‘This could happen before 18 months if everything goes well, but we and [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony] Fauci and others are being careful not to promise this when we are not sure. The work is going at full speed,’ he wrote.
Gates explained that if a vaccine is developed, it should go to health care workers and ‘critical workers’ first.
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