Короновирус
Notes from UCSF Expert panel - March 10
University of California, San Francisco BioHub Panel on
COVID-19
March 10, 2020
- Panelists
- Joe DeRisi: UCSF’s top infectious disease
researcher. Co-president of ChanZuckerberg BioHub (a JV
involving UCSF / Berkeley / Stanford). Co-inventor of the
chip used in SARS epidemic. - Emily Crawford: COVID task force director. Focused
on diagnostics - Cristina Tato: Rapid Response
Director. Immunologist. - Patrick Ayescue: Leading outbreak response and
surveillance. Epidemiologist. - Chaz Langelier: UCSF Infectious Disease doc
What’s below are essentially direct quotes from the
panelists. I bracketed the few things that are not quotes.
- Top takeaways
- At this point, we are past
containment. Containment is basically
futile. Our containment efforts won’t
reduce the number who get infected in the US. - Now we’re just trying to slow the spread, to
help healthcare providers deal with the demand peak. In
other words, the goal of containment is to "flatten the
curve", to lower the peak of the surge of demand that will hit
healthcare providers. And to buy time, in hopes a drug
can be developed. - How many in the community already have the
virus? No one knows. - We are moving from containment to care.
- We in the US are currently where at where Italy was a
week ago. We see nothing to say we will be substantially
different. - 40-70% of the US population will be infected over the
next 12-18 months. After that level you can start to get
herd immunity. Unlike flu this is entirely novel to
humans, so there is no latent immunity in the global
population. - [We used their numbers to work out a guesstimate
of deaths— indicating about 1.5 million Americans may
die. The panelists did not disagree with our
estimate. This compares to seasonal flu’s average of
50K Americans per year. Assume 50% of US
population, that’s 160M people infected. With 1% mortality
rate that's 1.6M Americans die over the next 12-18 months.] - The fatality rate is in the range of 10X flu.
- This assumes no drug is found effective and made
available. - The death rate varies hugely by age. Over age
80 the mortality rate could be 10-15%. [See
chart by age Signe found online, attached at bottom.] - Don’t know whether COVID-19 is seasonal but if is and
subsides over the summer, it is likely to roar back in fall as
the 1918 flu did. - I can only tell you two things
definitively. Definitively it’s going to get worse before
it gets better. And we'll be dealing with this for the
next year at least. Our lives are going to look different
for the next year. - What should we do now? What are you doing for
your family? - Appears one can be infectious before being
symptomatic. We don’t know how infectious before
symptomatic, but know that highest level of virus prevalence
coincides with symptoms. We currently think folks are
infectious 2 days before through 14 days after onset of
symptoms (T-2 to T+14 onset). - How long does the virus last?
- On surfaces, best guess is 4-20 hours depending on surface
type (maybe a few days) but still no consensus on this - The virus is very susceptible to common anti-bacterial
cleaning agents: bleach, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol-based. - Avoid concerts, movies, crowded places.
- We have cancelled business travel.
- Do the basic hygiene, eg hand washing and avoiding touching
face. - Stockpile your critical prescription medications. Many
pharma supply chains run through China. Pharma companies
usually hold 2-3 months of raw materials, so may run out given
the disruption in China’s manufacturing.
Pneumonia shot might be helpful. Not preventative of
COVID-19, but reduces your chance of being weakened, which makes
COVID-19 more dangerous. - Get a flu shot next fall. Not preventative of COVID-19,
but reduces your chance of being weakened, which makes COVID-19
more dangerous. - We would say “Anyone over 60 stay at home unless it’s
critical”. CDC toyed with idea of saying anyone
over 60 not travel on commercial airlines.
We at UCSF are moving our “at-risk” parents back from
nursing homes, etc. to their own homes. Then are
not letting them out of the house. The other members of the
family are washing hands the moment they come in. - Three routes of infection
- Hand to mouth / face
- Aerosol transmission
- Fecal oral route
- What if someone is sick?
- If someone gets sick, have them stay home and socially
isolate. There is very little you can do at a hospital
that you couldn’t do at home. Most cases are
mild. But if they are old or have lung or cardio-vascular
problems, read on. - If someone gets quite sick who is old (70+) or with lung or
cardio-vascular problems, take them to the ER. - There is no accepted treatment for COVID-19. The hospital
will give supportive care (eg IV fluids, oxygen) to help you
stay alive while your body fights the disease. ie to
prevent sepsis. - If someone gets sick who is high risk (eg is both old and has
lung/cardio-vascular problems), you can try to get them enrolled
for “compassionate use" of Remdesivir, a drug that is in
clinical trial at San Francisco General and UCSF, and in
China. Need to find a doc there in order to ask to
enroll. Remdesivir is an anti-viral from Gilead that showed
effectiveness against MERS in primates and is being tried
against COVID-19. If the trials succeed it might be
available for next winter as production scales up far faster for
drugs than for vaccines. [More I found
online.] - Why is the fatality rate much higher for older adults?
- Your immune system declines past age 50
- Fatality rate tracks closely with “co-morbidity”, ie the
presence of other conditions that compromise the patient’s
hearth, especially respiratory or cardio-vascular
illness. These conditions are higher in older
adults. - Risk of pneumonia is higher in older adults.
- What about testing to know if someone has
COVID-19? - Bottom line, there is not enough testing capacity to be
broadly useful. Here’s why. - Currently, there is no way to determine what a person has
other than a PCR test. No other test can yet distinguish
"COVID-19 from flu or from the other dozen respiratory bugs that
are circulating”. - A Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test can detect COVID-19’s
RNA. However they still don’t have confidence in the test’s
specificity, ie they don’t know the rate of false
negatives. - The PCR test requires kits with reagents and requires clinical
labs to process the kits. - While the kits are becoming available, the lab capacity is not
growing. - The leading clinical lab firms, Quest and Labcore have
capacity to process 1000 kits per day. For the nation. - Expanding processing capacity takes “time, space, and
equipment.” And certification. ie it won’t happen
soon. - UCSF and UCBerkeley have donated their research labs to
process kits. But each has capacity to process only 20-40
kits per day. And are not clinically certified. - Novel test methods are on the horizon, but not here now and
won’t be at any scale to be useful for the present danger. - How well is society preparing for the impact?
- Local hospitals are adding capacity as we speak. UCSF’s
Parnassus campus has erected “triage tents” in a parking
lot. They have converted a ward to “negative pressure”
which is needed to contain the virus. They are considering
re-opening the shuttered Mt Zion facility. - If COVID-19 affected children then we would be seeing mass
departures of families from cities. But thankfully now we
know that kids are not affected. - School closures are one the biggest societal impacts. We
need to be thoughtful before we close schools, especially
elementary schools because of the knock-on effects. If
elementary kids are not in school then some hospital staff can’t
come to work, which decreases hospital capacity at a time of
surging demand for hospital services. - Public Health systems are prepared to deal with short-term
outbreaks that last for weeks, like an outbreak of
meningitis. They do not have the capacity to sustain for
outbreaks that last for months. Other solutions will have
to be found. - What will we do to handle behavior changes that can last for
months? - Many employees will need to make accommodations for elderly
parents and those with underlying conditions and
immune-suppressed. - Kids home due to school closures
- [Dr. DeRisi had to leave the meeting for a call with the
governor’s office. When he returned we asked what the call
covered.] The epidemiological models the state is using to
track and trigger action. The state is planning at what
point they will take certain actions. ie what will trigger
an order to cease any gatherings of over 1000 people. - Where do you find reliable news?
- The John Hopkins Center for Health Security site. Which
posts daily updates. The site says you can sign up to
receive a daily newsletter on COVID-19 by email. [I tried
and the page times out due to high demand. After three more
tries I was successful in registering for the newsletter.] - The New York Times is good on scientific accuracy.
- Observations on China
- Unlike during SARS, China’s scientists are publishing openly
and accurately on COVID-19. - While China’s early reports on incidence were clearly low,
that seems to trace to their data management systems being
overwhelmed, not to any bad intent. - Wuhan has 4.3 beds per thousand while US has 2.8 beds
per thousand. Wuhan built 2 additional hospitals
in 2 weeks. Even so, most patients were sent to gymnasiums
to sleep on cots. - Early on no one had info on COVID-19. So China reacted in
a way unique modern history, except in wartime. - Every few years there seems another: SARS, Ebola,
MERS, H1N1, COVID-19. Growing strains of antibiotic
resistant bacteria. Are we in the twilight of a century
of medicine’s great triumph over infectious disease? - "We’ve been in a back and forth battle against viruses for a
million years." - But it would sure help if every country would shut down their
wet markets. - As with many things, the worst impact of COVID-19 will likely
be in the countries with the least resources, eg
Africa. See article on Wired magazine on sequencing of
virus from Cambodia.