EMILY LANDON: I'm really worried that five years
after this pandemic, people are going to be like, well
that's over.
And we're probably not going to have one for another 100 years.
This is not a once in a lifetime kind of thing.
PRESENTER: The coronavirus is changing life
as we know it on a daily basis.
In COVID 2025, we'll explore how the pandemic
is rewriting our future.
EMILY LANDON: I think it's really important for us
to understand that these sorts of diseases, zoonosis,
as we'll call them, or things that come from animals that
can be transmitted to humans, are actually increasing
in prevalence as we have climate change
and as more and more humans populate the earth
and move into these parts of the planet
that we didn't live in before.
That's where you can get some viruses or diseases
to jump from animals into humans,
and then cause more disease.
It's not like every single time you hang out
in a cave with some bats you're going to pick up a new disease,
but certainly some of these are going
to turn into more illnesses.
It would be great if we had people
who were part of some sort of reserve epidemiology corps that
could help be there in a bad situation,
get things under control by doing this contact tracing,
contacting everybody, and making sure
that the earliest cases were contained.
Being able to be devoted to and have the kind of public health
system that can really do the things that we need it to do
early on, and then respecting them,
that when they say we got to do this now,
that we're all going to be all in
and do it together, even if it's hard.
We're not going to wait for things
to look like they did in Italy or even in New York City.
Some of these apps that they're using
in some of the Asian countries, in Singapore and South Korea
specifically, are really cool.
When someone gets a test result that's positive,
they can enter it into their phone,
and then all the other people that
were in a risk zone with them during their contagious period
would be notified that they'd been exposed.
This is kind of like electronic contact tracing.
There are a lot of concerns about privacy with them.
And we don't have a nationalized health care system.
So there's no national health data registry
where test results could be downloaded from.
There a lot of barriers to implementing some kind
of technology like that.
But these are not barriers that we can't overcome.
One of the things we need to work on
is better technology for our PPE.
So PPE stands for personal protective equipment,
and you have heard a lot about it in the news,
about how we don't have enough of it, and we really don't.
Because in a respiratory virus pandemic, or really
any transmissible disease, requires
us to wear a lot of different personal protective equipment.
Truth is that reusing these items, as a lot of people
have been doing because they haven't had enough of them,
is not a great solution.
I would really like to see us go back to using cloth gowns,
like we used to use way back when.
I also think it would be great if we could come up with a way
to have fabric masks that can be reused,
as opposed to needing to have millions and millions of N95s
and surgical masks produced in mass in order to meet
the need of an epidemic.
If we had masks that were made with fabric
and could be laundered and reused,
that would be a really big improvement
in healthcare, a way to make things
reusable but also sustainable.
We've changed literally everything about what we do
and how we do it at the hospital.
I mean, my job is completely different than it used to be.
Not in terms of the content or in terms of the work that I do,
but in terms of how I do it.
Most of the consultations from experts and specialists
like me are done by video conference now, and by calling
patients on their phone.
I think the video visit and the incorporation of technology
into medical care is huge, and it's
going to be with us forever going forward.
And it got a real jump start from this pandemic.
What would be the worst case scenario?
If we decided that the real lesson that we were supposed
to learn here was that we didn't really need to do any of that
stay at home stuff, because nothing bad happened anyway.
And the CDC, we didn't need all those tests,
we didn't need all those instructions,
and contact tracing, you know, we got along fine without it.
So let's just, let's defund these things
and not spend so much time on them.
Then we'll be even less prepared when there's
a problem again in the future.
One of the things that's been really striking to me
about this pandemic is how important
it is that we trust science.
I mean, this is a virus.
It's not a Republican or a Democrat.
And as much as you want to fight with it or negotiate with it,
it's biology.
It is going to follow the laws of science
and the laws of transmission.
And so we all have to work together
to trust experts in these areas.
Best case scenario, we're able to transform our healthcare
system into something that meets the needs of everyone,
that we're able to find a way to reduce costs and still provide
access to everyone, that we commit to making sure
that everyone, everyone can get the care that they need
any time they need it in the United States,
that we have a public health system that we trust, and we
respect, we beef up the CDC and our local public health
departments and our state public health departments
and treat them like the heroes that they are,
and when they say something is a problem,
that we jump into action.