Jennifer Nuzzo: “We’re Definitely Not Overreacting” to #COVID-19 | JSTOR Daily
►https://daily.jstor.org/jennifer-nuzzo-were-definitely-not-overreacting-to-covid-19
(Johns Hopkins epidemiologist and infectious disease expert)
We think new flu strains emerge by being passed between birds and mammals and then adapting to humans. This animal-human environmental interface is an important driver for the spillover of viruses into the human population. Colleagues of mine who work on these issues have looked at what important determinants are, and one thing that rises to the test is that land use change seems to be an important driver. It puts humans into contact with animal species that they may not have had contact with before. Or it changes where animals wind up living.
This is important because the frequency with which these events are occurring is increasing. There’s some good data on that. And the majority of these events are of zoonotic origin.
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Are there actions that we could have taken that might’ve changed the course we’re on now? Or was what is happening now—shuttered businesses and schools, stay-at-home orders— inevitable?
No, I don’t think it was inevitable. I think the fact that we are all sitting here sheltering in place is the result of a lack of preparedness and a lack of appropriate response once we saw what was happening in China. I mean we have a third of the population of China, and we had several months lead time. Yet we now have more cases than China ever had. In my mind, that’s failure.
And I think one of the huge limits in our response was that we waited too long to start testing in the way that we would’ve needed to. [...]
There were many other countries that were reporting cases. And so, it was highly probable, if not almost a certainty, that there were cases in the United States. We just weren’t looking for them. We basically didn’t tune in to our epidemic until it became painfully obvious that it was happening.
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In the next phase, are there policies that we can enact that might help us return to some sort of normalcy?
I think vaccines are not going to be a realistic solution for years. The 12-to-18 month timeline that you’ve likely heard assumes that the science works in our favor. But it will take years to get the quantities that we need. I don’t see vaccines being a viable solution for a long time.
I think what’s going to happen now is that we will, through these crippling social distancing measures, eventually slow our incidents to a more manageable point. And then we’ll have to think about relaxing the social distancing measures very slowly. But in order to be able to do that, so that we don’t wind up back where we started, we’re going to have to do what Singapore and South Korea did. We have to test widely in order to very rapidly identify cases, and then we will have to isolate those cases as soon as we find them, so they can’t transmit their disease to others. We have to identify their contacts, so that we can figure out if those people too have been infected. And we will have to monitor cases of transmission for a period of time—test and isolate so they don’t transmit.
