The Coronavirus pandemic continues to affect the globe, with over 2 Million confirmed cases globally – more than 128,000 people around the world have already died from COVID-19 complications.
The United States has become the epicenter of the virus with more 600,000 reported cases. New York State has been hardest hit, with over 200,000 confirmed cases – a count higher than any other country in the world.
Sadly, experts say these official numbers might not even reflect the true count of actual cases – due to the continuing lack of available tests in many areas.
According to a New York Times report, doctors also believe that causes of some deaths in early February or March may have been misidentified as influenza or pneumonia.
“We definitely think there are deaths that we have not accounted for,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told the publication.
Medical professionals have also treated patients early on in the outbreak, before testing was available, that may have been related to coronavirus.
“When I was working before we had testing, we had a ton of patients with pneumonia,” said Geraldine Ménard, chief of general internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. “I remember thinking it was weird. I’m sure some of those patients did have it. But no one knew back then.”
In a CDC analysis released on Tuesday (April 14), an early snapshot of infections in health-care workers across the country shows over 9,000 of people in the front lines have already tested positive for coronavirus, per the Washington Post.
And, according White House’s coronavirus task force, although there are signs of improvement in the spread of the virus, the country “has not reached the peak” of the outbreak – and shouldn’t relax preventive measures just yet.
“And so every day we need to continue to do what we did yesterday and the week before and the week before that, because that’s what in the end is going to take us up across the peak and down the other side,” Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, said.
“It’s important to remember that this is not the time to feel that – since we have made such important advances in the sense of success of the mitigation – that we need to be pulling back at all,” the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, added.
And the battle to flatten the curve seems to be far from over.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says there could be a second wave of the novel coronavirus infections – which is likely to hit in the winter.
“I think we have to assume this is like other respiratory viruses and there will be a seasonality to it,” Dr. Redfield said in an interview on Good Morning America.
“Until we see it, we don’t know for certain,” he added. “But i think it’s critical that we plan this virus is likely to follow a seasonality pattern similar to flu, and we’re going to have another battle with it upfront and aggressively next winter.”
He also stresses that the country needs to prepare before that second wave hits, which includes, improving testing capacity, expanding public health capacity so that health workers can detect cases early, conducting contact tracing and isolating potentially infected individuals.
“I call it block and tackle,” Dr. Redfield said. “The outbreak this year got ahead of that, so we went into full mitigation and we lost the ability to use critical public health tools. We are working hard to augment them now so that, as we get into the next season, we’ll be able to stay in high containment mode while we complement that with some continued mitigation strategies.”
In the meantime, drugmakers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for the deadly pathogen.
According to the World Health Organization, 70 vaccines are currently in development – three of those are now being tested in human trials.
A vaccine may be the most effective way to contain the spread of the virus as it looks unlikely to be stamped out through containment measures alone. Add to that reports of patients who have recovered from COVID-19 getting re-infected with the virus.
However, the speed in which these are being developed is unprecedented. It usually takes 10-15 years for a vaccine to get from development to market, but now, the goal is to be able to put it out within the year.
