Top infectious disease specialist speaks

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Dr. Anthony Fauci

Belize currently has a set of COVID-19 protocols in place in an attempt to stem the cases of COVID-19. We can learn much by following the science on how to address the rapid spread of a highly infectious respiratory disease.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the U.S for 36 years and has helped guide responses to a succession of viral epidemics: HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Ebola and Zika, among others. The physician recently spoke to the media about the next steps in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the discussion, Dr. Fauci highlighted an important gap in treatment options for newly infected people: more antiviral interventions are still needed for early cases of the disease—and, if successful, they could perhaps address future outbreaks that might be triggered by other emerging coronaviruses.
Dr. Fauci claims that Coronavirus infections can be brought under control. He believes that if the controls are uniformly done with public health guidelines—wearing masks, keeping physically distanced, avoiding crowded situations, doing things outdoors more than indoors and washing hands frequently—he believes that there will be an effect.
Even though vaccines are on the way, Fauci believes that drugs for early COVID-19 will still be needed.
“A lot of people will still be getting sick until we get a level of herd immunity from the vaccine to essentially eliminate this infection from society. Until then, we’re going to need drugs for each and every stage of the infection: early, intermediate and late. Those types of drugs might also be used against yet another pandemic coronavirus. Remember, this is the third pandemic coronavirus we’ve dealt with in 18 years, starting with the SARS outbreak in 2002, then the MERS [Middle East respiratory syndrome] outbreak in 2012 and now COVID-19,” he said.
His choice for drug treatments are those that are direct-acting antiviral agents that can be administered orally. These drugs can be given—likely in combination—for maybe five to six days or a week at most to completely suppress the virus.
“If you’re talking about an antiviral that protects against all viruses, then I think that’s a bridge too far. But you could get a broad-spectrum antiviral that will be good against all strains of coronaviruses and then maybe a different one that works within another family of viruses. An antiviral that worked against any manner or form of coronaviruses would be highly desirable. If we took the problem of yet another emerging pandemic coronavirus off the table, that would be a major advance,” he also said.
Dr. Fauci also spoke about the need for global interconnectivity, a global health security agenda, and adequate resources and science. A part of the pandemic preparedness that was very successful was the investment put into the technologies now available in the field of vaccinology that allowed scientists to go from identifying a brand-new virus [around early] January to having a vaccine that’s ready to administer to people in less than one year. That is a pace of scientific advance that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. Dr. Fauci believes that the implementation of some public health measures has obviously not been as successful.