Dr. Peter Hotez: Will Coronavirus Be a Seasonal Virus?

How long can we go? Let's take economics out of it. What would you think if there was no concern whatsoever about economic loss and the damage to the economy, what would you recommend in terms of just purely from a medical perspective? Well the problem is from a medical and public health perspective, we don't really know where this virus is heading. I forget what Dr. Fauci said, the virus makes the decisions, we don't make the decisions. So although not entirely true because we can make, we can enact an intervention. So hopefully by the summer this is not going to be a huge problem but we don't know. And then we also don't know if this thing's coming back. So what did the out years look like? Does it exist, even if it goes down this summer, does it come back up again in the fall? Does it come back up again early next year? Can I pause you for a second there? Why would that happen? Why would it come back? Why would it go away and then come back in the fall? Well there's a few things that are happening. One, all the social distancing potentially could interrupt the transmission. We use this number called the reproductive number which describes the number of people that get infected and a single individual has it. So the number right now is between two and four depending on whose numbers you look at. The idea is you bring that below one by the social distancing. There's also the question of whether there's seasonality to this virus. And again, the Skymark Lipsich has done some studies to show that there seems, the virus infection doesn't seem to be as severe in areas that have higher temperatures and greater humidity. It's a soft call, but maybe there's going to be some seasonality to this as well. And so let's use an example of another seasonal virus, influenza, which peaks of course in the winter then goes down in the summer months. It never really disappears, but it goes down. But then in the southern hemisphere, it's the opposite. So in the southern hemisphere, peak flu season is our summer, their winter in places like Australia. And in the tropics, it's about the same all year round. So we don't really understand seasonality. Potentially, the virus could start showing a pattern like that. And then the question is, does it come back year after year after year like flu does, and it shows some kind of seasonality. These are all scenarios that are being looked at. So for instance, our vaccine, if it's used and goes through all the clinical testing hurdles, it probably is not going to be used for this 2020 epidemic. If it's used at all, it's going to be used in the out years if this virus starts to come back on a regular basis.