“Worse Than Anything We’ve Ever Seen”
APRIL 7, 2020
Frontline Doctors Race to Learn the Mysteries of a Deadly Virus
"Months into the pandemic, the novel coronavirus is still largely an unknown—“very perplexing,” says one infectious disease specialist, while another predicts the death toll “could easily be 1 million.”
s the official U.S. death toll from COVID-19 passed 10,000, Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned that Americans should brace for “the hardest and saddest week” of their lives. During a press appearance over the weekend, he called the coming days “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.” Inside New York–area hospitals, the prospects match his grim tone. In addition to struggling with widely-reported supply shortages, working seemingly endless shifts, and struggling to manage the influx of patients, infectious disease experts say that even as they’re racing to develop an effective vaccine, they are essentially learning on the job.
“The infection itself does have some perplexing features,” said Dr. Megan Coffee, a clinical assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine specializing in infectious diseases and immunology, who coauthored a study about an experimental A.I. tool that predicts which patients with the virus will develop a serious respiratory illness. She listed just a few of the many unanswered questions: “We don’t yet know what we can do to prevent this immunologic response. We also don’t fully understand why some, who are healthy, go on to have severe disease and others, with more risk, do not.”
Specific characteristics of the virus likewise remain a mystery. “The pandemic of 1918…was associated with bacterial as well as viral pneumonia, which does not seem to be the case with the novel coronavirus,” said Dr. Joseph M. Vinetz, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who also specializes in infectious diseases. “But we still don’t know whether coronavirus can lead to secondary or superimposed bacterial pneumonia in addition to [causing] immune damage to the lungs, which is the primary cause of severe illness and death.” This coronavirus, he said, is puzzling due to its “unique combination of asymptomatic infectiousness, and the delayed onset of severe disease. Very perplexing.”"
moar:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/frontline-doctors-race-to-learn-mysteries-of-coronavirus-new-york