SARASOTA – It’s paramount to stay at home to keep community spread from happening, and potentially causing a second wave, according to Dr. David Durand.
He is an anatomic and clinical pathologist with training in molecular biology, immunology and virology.
“There is going to be another wave, the question is, ‘how big?” Dr. Durand said.
He says this with certainty because there is no vaccine yet.
“If we had a vaccine, then we would be like the flu, where people actually have some immunological benefit from previous vaccinations.”
So, in order to prevent a second wave, Dr. Durand addresses the importance of every state in the U.S. to create a stay-at home order.
“If Florida does its job, and say if Georgia didn’t have a stay-at-home order, which it actually does, finally,” Dr. Durand said. “Then we would be subject to reinfection by residents of Georgia coming into our state after we’ve done our hard work, giving up income and the rest, and then just go back to another whole round of pandemic.”
To prevent re-infection, Dr. Durand says we need to create a small army of Public Health Coronavirus Case Tracing Agents before the Stay-At-Home Order is lifted.
“If we don’t develop a workforce basically around that in the public health, in the CDC, and also locally, in Florida, in the county, at whatever level,” Dr. Durand said. “If we don’t have that in place, we will have an even bigger wave. So, the idea is to keep whatever comes back, low.”
This is why the stay-at-home order is so important.
“We’re trying to buy time to the point where we have a vaccine. And there are like 20 companies working on a vaccine, so it should come sooner rather than later.”
Dr. Durand says we should be following South Korea’s lead.
“They were very aggressive about contact tracing early on. They did a lot of testing; they find a positive case and asked who are you with.”
Singapore is also another country to learn from. The country is using a high-tech surveillance app to track the coronavirus.
It’s an app using Bluetooth to track a users’ proximity to other people, alerting those may come in contact with someone who has tested positive.
Dr. Durand says it could be the formula for keeping the case numbers down.
“You could be sending that data to the government anonymously,” Dr. Durand said. “And they could just say you were exposed to somebody for too many minutes in the wrong place; you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
While this technology could work well in the U.S., Dr. Durand understands the concern of privacy.
No matter the method, he says the primary goal right now, is to get those case numbers low.
“The testing isn’t as valuable unless the case numbers are low, and that’s why we’re staying at home,” Dr. Durand said.
