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General Pandemic Update
2020.06.09 08:47
Fauci describes the virus as his ‘worst nightmare’ and discusses possible vaccines.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in Washington in April. by Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
The top U.S. infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, delivered a grim assessment of the devastation wrought around the world by the coronavirus, describing Covid-19 on Tuesday as his “worst nightmare” — a new, highly contagious respiratory infection that causes a significant rate of illness and death.
“In a period of four months, it has devastated the whole world,” Dr. Fauci told biotech executives during a conference held by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. “And it isn’t over yet.”
His discussion with a moderator was conducted remotely and videotaped for conference participants. Although Dr. Fauci said he had known that an outbreak like this could occur, one aspect surprised him: “how rapidly it just took over the planet.”
An efficiently transmitted disease can spread worldwide in six months or a year, but “this took about a month,” Dr. Fauci said. He attributed the rapid spread to the contagiousness of the virus and extensive world travel by infected people.
Vaccines are widely regarded as the best hope of stopping or at least slowing the pandemic, and Dr. Fauci said he was “almost certain” that more than one would be successful. Several are already being tested in people, and at least one is expected to move into large, Phase 3 trials in July.
But much is still unknown about the disease and how it attacks the body, research that Dr. Fauci described as “a work in progress.” Another looming question, he said, was whether survivors who were seriously ill would fully recover.
Dr. Fauci said that he had spent much of his career studying H.I.V. and that the disease it caused was “really simple compared to what’s going on with Covid-19.”
The differences, he said, included Covid’s broad range of severity: no symptoms at all to critical illness and death, with lung damage, intense immune responses and clotting disorders that have caused strokes even in young people, as well as a separate inflammatory syndrome causing severe illness in some children.
“Oh my goodness,” Dr. Fauci said. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it.”
Comment 5
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Dr. Fauci is only 5 months younger than I, and
certainly is my personal inspiration.
wish him all the best in his continuing war against the virus.
He is about the only authoritative voice out of the scientific community that
the public can continue to depend on.
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Extensive brain pathologies including pan-encephalitis, meningitis, and brainstem neuronal cell damage were seen in six German COVID-19 patients on autopsy. (The Lancet)
A cemetery worker wore protective gear in Mexico City on Sunday.Credit... Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images
The virus is surging in Latin America, pushing the region ‘to the limit.’
The outbreak is spreading rapidly in Latin America and the Caribbean, prompting Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, the director of the Pan American Health Organization, to warn on Tuesday that the unfolding crisis had “pushed our region to the limit.”
Cases are surging in countries that took early isolation measures — like Peru, which is just behind Italy in its case count — and in those that ignored recommendations, like Brazil, which has the second-highest tally worldwide, behind only the United States, according to a New York Times database.
Forced to choose between watching citizens die of the virus or of hunger, governments are loosening lockdowns, even as they watch infections climb.
“We go to bed without eating, giving nothing to our children,” said María Camila Salazar, 22, a mother of two in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. The country has more than 40,000 confirmed cases and 1,300 deaths.
Ms. Salazar and her family, like millions across Latin America, collect cardboard, glass and plastic for a living, selling it by the kilogram. Their buyers closed during the country’s lockdown, just as she gave birth to her second child.
President Iván Duque of Colombia recently relaxed lockdown rules, allowing local officials to make the final call on regulations. The national caseload subsequently surged.
Some countries have also suppressed information about the virus. In Mexico, the government is not reporting hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths in Mexico City. In Brazil, which has confirmed 700,000 cases, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government decided to stop reporting the cumulative toll altogether; late Monday, a Supreme Court justice ordered the government to stop suppressing the data.
New cases reached a new single-day global high on Sunday: 136,000, with three-quarters in just 10 countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia. That adds to a global case tally of more than 7 million people worldwide and more than 400,000 deaths.