(soft music)
- COVID-19 is the name of a disease and a pandemic
that's affecting us all here and around the world.
Many people have questions about COVID-19.
What I'd like to do today is to answer
some of those more common questions that people have.
Knowledge is important, it helps us understand
what's going on.
Let's jump right in.
What kind of virus causes COVID-19?
COVID-19 is the name of a disease
caused by a coronavirus.
The coronavirus is nothing new.
It's a virus that's been around for decades,
even centuries.
Most commonly causes a common cold
or upper respiratory infection.
What's different about this coronavirus,
the coronavirus that causes COVID-19,
is that it can lead to severe respiratory illness.
That's happened before in recent history.
Two related cousins of this coronavirus,
one called SARS and one called MERS,
also had the propensity to cause
severe respiratory illnesses.
The formal name for this virus
is SARS CoV2.
SARS is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome,
CoV means coronavirus, and it's number two
that distinguishes it from the original SARS coronavirus.
Is there more than one strain of the virus?
We now know that there are several strains
of the coronavirus that are traveling the world.
What's important to know is that these viruses
are closely related to one another.
In fact, they only differ from a few elements
of their genetic material.
That helps us to distinguish these viruses
and to be able to locate them
or relate them to different geographic locations,
but importantly, these are not mutations or changes
that lead to a difference in the strength
or so-called pathogenicity of the virus.
What are we learning about how long the virus stays alive
in the air or on surfaces?
We know from recent published data
that the virus that causes COVID-19
can be detected in the air or on certain surfaces
such as plastic.
Detection however, is not the same as
being able to transmit to another person.
We know that a person who's infected with COVID-19
can transmit the virus through droplets,
droplets of mucus, for instance, during coughing
or sneezing, or even talking.
However, these droplets do not hang in the air
for very long, and they aren't projected very far,
perhaps only six feet or less.
They quickly fall to the ground and are not at risk
for transmitting to other people.
More commonly would be that a person infected with the virus
that causes COVID-19
touches their mouth or their eyes, or their nose,
and then has a little bit of mucus with the virus
on their hands, and then shakes hands with somebody else.
That could transmit the virus.
What about virus found on surfaces?
It turns out that the amount of virus is greatly reduced
within hours, and it's not known
whether a small amount of virus two to three days later
could actually set up infection in another person.
Of course we have to be careful in these times.
People need to be attentive about
washing their hands frequently with soap and water
for at least 20 seconds.
Trying not to touch one's eyes, nose or mouth
can also reduce the risk of exposure.
If we practice these common sense ways
of avoiding contact with other surfaces,
that will greatly reduce our risk
for acquiring COVID-19.
Does the amount of virus a person is exposed to
determine how sick they'll get?
We don't actually know the answer to that question.
People have suggested that the amount of virus
that one becomes exposed to could trigger illness,
and that perhaps people who were exposed to more illness
might get sicker faster, but we really
don't know that information.
Are people who are asymptomatic
still able to infect others?
This is a question we still don't know the answer to.
There's good data to suggest that there is
some proportion of people who may have the virus
but be completely asymptomatic.
More commonly, people do get symptoms from this virus,
and the most common symptoms are fever and cough.
Are people immune for a long time
after they've recovered from COVID-19,
such as other viral illnesses
like measles or chickenpox?
What we do know is that people develop
the antibody to this coronavirus
between two and 17 days after they've developed symptoms.
What we don't know is is this antibody protective?
We know from other respiratory viral infections
that once a person develops the antibody,
they are relatively immune for some period of time,
but we don't yet know that for this coronavirus.
Even if someone is immune, we don't know
how long they might be immune for.
It's going to take additional studies to determine that.
What are the potential treatments
being investigated for COVID-19?
- Today there is no proven treatment for COVID-19,
but there is an enormous amount
of clinical research going on
trying to identify treatments that might be helpful.
Some of these would be investigational antivirals.
These are medications that would interfere
with the virus' ability to reproduce itself.
We use antivirals for other common viral infections
with some success, including influenza,
herpes, hepatitis C, and HIV.
We don't yet have a proven antiviral medication
for COVID-19, but a number of clinical trials
are in progress.
There are a number of immunomodulators.
These are drugs that could interfere,
or change the immune response,
that are in clinical trials right now.
What do we know about the potential for a vaccine
against the virus that causes COVID-19,
and when might we have a vaccine?
Well, the good news is there's a lot of research
going on right now and just a few weeks ago,
the first humans were dosed with a candidate vaccine
against COVID-19.
The first trials of vaccines typically want to establish
that they're safe.
That's really important.
Then the next set of studies usually go to document
that the vaccine is effective
in preventing the infection in other people.
Where are we with this?
Most experts are thinking that it's going to take
at least 18 months to go from the first doses,
which again, were only a few weeks ago,
to having an effective vaccine
that might be scaled up and manufactured,
and available worldwide.
Will COVID-19 go away, like SARS did,
or will it be part of seasonal flus and colds?
- Well, we don't know the answer to that,
and actually we don't know why SARS came,
or why the original SARS went away.
We really don't know that.
I think most people feel that this virus
that causes COVID-19 may be
a recurrent virus that is a part
of the seasonal infections that people get
in the winter, such as other flus and colds.
So if COVID-19 does become seasonal,
what can we do about it?
And that's where the hope for an effective vaccine
comes into play.
It turns out that coronaviruses,
the viruses that cause COVID-19
and other similar illnesses,
do not mutate very rapidly.
That's in big contrast to influenza.
That's a virus that can change itself
and that leads to us needing a new vaccine
every single year.
What's different about the coronaviruses
is that they don't mutate so much,
and so we may be able to find a vaccine
that will be effective, and not necessarily
needed to be given every single season.
What is herd immunity, and how can it help us?
Herd immunity is a term for an infection
where much of the population has been exposed
and has developed effective immunity to it,
so you can imagine if there's a population of people.
Say 100 people, and 90 have acquired an infection
and developed resistance
or immunity to it.
It's going to be very uncommon that the other 10 people
would be exposed to the virus in that population.
Multiply that by millions of people,
and you get the same idea.
If most people in a population
have already had a virus and developed immunity,
it protects the small number of people
in that same population
who are not immune to the virus.
So that's the hope here.
Either enough people get the infection and recover
in a population, or we augment that
with a vaccine that most people can take,
and then you protect all of the people
in that population.
Because it's a new virus, essentially,
and a new infection, we don't know everything
about COVID-19.
We're learning every day.
What are the most common presentations?
Who will progress to more serious disease?
What are the risk factors for serious disease?
What are the most effective treatments for this virus?
There are a number of unanswered questions.
We're studying this here at Weill Cornell
in many different ways,
and trying to find answers,
and we all share the goal of trying to both
prevent this infection and treat this infection
in our patients.
(soft music)