In his continued efforts to spread awareness of the COVID-19 virus and help inform fans on proper ways to combat the worldwide pandemic, Warriors guard Stephen Curry took to Instagram to host a live chat with Dr. Anthony Fauci on the matter.
Fauci serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and is serving as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Curry interviewed the immunologist to get the most up-to-date information on the virus, provide insight into best practices during this time, and what can be expected in the future.
More from Curry’s interview with Dr. Fauci
Curry: “How is COVID-19 different from the flu in terms of how it interacts with the body and how it spreads?”
Dr. Fauci: “It’s similar in some respects, Steph, in that it’s a respiratory illness that’s transmitted by the respiratory root. It gives a degree of pathology that’s mostly pneumonia. The reason it’s different is that it’s very, very much more transmissible than flu, and more importantly it’s significantly more serious… the normal mortality of the seasonal flu that you and I confront every year is about 0.1 percent. The overall mortality of coronavirus is about one percent. Sometimes in China, it was up to two to three percent, which means it’s at least 10 times more serious than the typical influenza.”
Curry: “I know we’ve heard a lot of numbers around the discrepancy amongst ages and how it effects people with underlying health conditions or if you’re a little older?”
Dr. Fauci: “If you look at China, you look at Europe, you look at South Korea, it predominantly is reasonably benign if you want to call it that. You get sick, but you don’t get into serious trouble if you’re young… but what we are starting to see is that there are some people who are younger, people [of Curry’s] age, young, healthy, vigorous, who don’t have any underlying conditions who are getting seriously ill. It’s still a very, very small minority, but it doesn’t mean that young people [like Curry] should say I’m completely exempt from any risk of getting seriously ill.”
Curry: “What metric are you looking at to be able to determine when large gatherings and sporting events are OK to revisit as not a threat to continue spreading the virus?”
Dr. Fauci: “What you need to see is the trajectory of the curve start to come down. We seen that in China they went up and down, they’re starting to get back to some normal life. They got to be careful they don’t reintroduce the virus into China, but they’re on the other end of the curve. Korea is doing that, they’re starting to come back down. Europe, particularly Italy, is in a terrible situation: they’re still going way up. The United States is a big country. We have so many different regions like New York City right now which is having a terrible time, and yet there are place in the country that are doing quite well… we could start thinking about getting back to some degree of normality when the country as a whole has turned that corner and started coming down.”
Curry: “I know there’s a timeline for developing a vaccine. I heard it’s a 12 to 18-month timeline to be able to roll that out. What does that process look like and what is the likelihood we get to success in that time?”
Dr. Fauci: “We have started on the development of a vaccine faster than ever in the history of any virus, from the time it was discovered to the time we actually made it and put it into a trial. But when you test the vaccine it takes multiple phases. The first thing you got to do is make sure it’s safe. We started that a couple of weeks ago… Phase two is pretrial to determine if it works. That’s the thing that’s going to take an additional eight months or so. So when you add up the three or four months for phase one plus the seven or eight months, you get about a year to a year and a half.
If we really push, we hope that we will know by the time we get into next winter whether or not we have something that works. A vaccine is going to be totally relevant if it cycles into another season, which Steph quite frankly, I think it’s going to do because this virus is very, very transmissible… I cannot imagine it’s just going to disappear. So vaccines are going to be important the next time around, not for what we’re dealing with now.”