‘Nightmare’ that Fauci long feared now reality
The coronavirus pandemic is a public health official’s “worst nightmare” because of the efficient way the virus spreads and its confounding effects on the body, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infectious disease expert, said in a briefing ahead of a COVID19 conference set to start Friday.
The virtual coronavirus meeting was tagged onto the end of the International AIDS Conference, hosted this week by Bay Area HIV/AIDS leaders. Organizers said Thursday that 140 studies would be presented during the COVID19 meeting, which is scheduled to include presentations from Bill Gates and the U.N. secretarygeneral.
In a news briefing Thursday, Fauci said he’s been asked as a public health leader many times over the years, “What do we fear the
most?”
“And the answer is constant: the emergence of a respiratory illness that is highly efficient and has a significant degree of morbidity and mortality,” he said. “And unfortunately for our planet, that’s where we are right now with this historical COVID19 pandemic.”
The new coronavirus has infected more than 12 million people worldwide since it was first identified at the end of December in China. The United States accounts for a quarter of those cases. More than half a million people across the world have died of COVID19, including more than 130,000 in the United States.
“Public health measures have been variably successful,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force. “We in the United States are having a particular problem, the country hit most heavily both in number of cases and number of deaths.”
The virus was “thrust upon us suddenly and explosively,” Fauci said. Attempts to control it involve “very draconian methods,” he said, noting that the wide breadth of illness it causes — from no symptoms at all to varying degrees of severe disease and death — further complicate containment.
“I’ve never seen a virus in which you have 20% to 40% of individuals who have no symptoms at all, to individuals who get mild illness, to people who are confined to beds at home for weeks with multiple postviral symptoms, to some who require hospitalization, intensive care, ventilation, to death,” he said. “This is completely unique in what we’ve experienced.”
Scientists are racing to discover treatments to fight the disease, and massive resources are being pumped into developing a vaccine. Ahead of Friday’s COVID19 meeting, scientists released early results of two drug trials. One showed promising effects of treatment with a common hepatitis C twodrug therapy, and the other provided more details on how patients do on the antiviral remdesivir.
The hepatitis C drugs sofosbuvir and daclatasvir were tested on hospitalized patients in Iran; 33 patients were given the drug combination and 33 were given a placebo. Patients in the drugtreated group had shorter hospitals stays and were more likely to fully recover during the trial period. Three people who received the drug therapy died, compared with five in the control group.
The COVID19 conference is scheduled to start with remarks from the head of the World Health Organization, followed by a session with Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. Other speakers include Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, and Jane Goodall, the world’s best known primatologist.
The International AIDS Conference had been scheduled to return to San Francisco this week for the first time in 30 years, but organizers were forced to move it all online because of the pandemic. About 20,000 people were set to attend the conference.
“We had the AIDS 2020 platform and we decided two months ago that not only did we have to make it virtual, but it would be crazy not to have a COVID meeting at the same time,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, cochair of the AIDS conference and a UCSF professor of medicine.