In your opinion, after this pandemic comes to a close, however long that may be, what should be the first step we as a global community take so that we are better prepared for the next pandemic? Other countries will do it somewhat differently but a combination of testing and social isolation clearly works and that is all we have until we get a vaccine. Of course that isolation created a lot of difficulties for the people involved but they were able to stop the case spread. What do you think about China ’s response to the outbreak? How would you rate their response on a scale 1-10?Īfter January 23 when they realized how serious it was they did strong social isolation which made a huge difference. Unfortunately low-income students will be hurt more by the situation than others so we need to help any way we can. Microsoft and others are working on getting machines out but the supply chain is quite constrained. Comcast and other internet connectivity providers are doing special programs to help with access. There are a lot of good online resources out there, including Khan Academy, CommonLit, Illustrative Mathematics, Zearn, and Scholastic. (If you are a teacher reading this, thank you for the work you’re doing.) But I know that not everyone is set up to teach remotely. I am impressed by the creative approaches that many teachers are coming up with to teach remotely. It is a huge problem that schools will likely be shut down for the next few months.
If it works it would be the fastest way to protect health care workers and patients who have severe disease.Īs an educator, what is something I can do for my students, especially for my low-income students who don ’ ’t have access to technology during this time? I have tried to send reassuring emails (including cat pictures), but I worry about the educational impact, as well as the long-term impact to my students well being. This may have antibodies to protect people. One idea that is being explored is using the blood (plasma) from people who are recovered. It could be an anti-viral or antibodies or something else. So I am hopeful something will come out of this.
The Foundation has organized a Therapeutics Accelerator to look at all the most promising ideas and bring all the capabilities of industry into play. Ideally this would reduce the number of people who need intensive care including respirators. I ’d also like to ask the same thing, but with regards to the timeline for an effective treatment.Ī therapeutic could be available well before a vaccine. Fauci and others are being careful not to promise this when we are not sure. This could happen before 18 months if everything goes well but we and Dr. The first vaccines we get will go to health care workers and critical workers.
Some vaccines like the flu don’t for the elderly. Vaccines require testing to make sure they are safe and effective. We will need literally billions of vaccines to protect the world. We will have to build lots of manufacturing for the different approaches knowing that some of them will not work. Some use a new approach called RNA which is unproven. There are over 6 different efforts going on to make a vaccine. Is there any chance that the 18 month timeline for development of a vaccine can be shortened, and by how much? We do need to stay calm even though this is an unprecedented situation. Some people like health care workers will be doing heroic work and we need to support them. I worry about all the economic damage but even worse will be how this will affect the developing countries who cannot do the social distancing the same way as rich countries and whose hospital capacity is much lower.Ĭan you explain briefly what most Americans can do to help other Americans in this moment of crisis?Ī big thing is to go along with the “shut down” approach in your community so that the infection rate drops dramatically to let us go back to normal as soon as possible. With the right actions including the testing and social distancing (which I call “shut down”) within 2-3 months the rich countries should have avoided high levels of infection.
My answer: The current phase has a lot of the cases in rich countries. Redditor’s question : What about the current crisis worries you the most? What gives you the most hope? In the meantime, stay healthy and keep washing your hands! I’ll be sharing more about COVID-19 here on the Gates Notes and on my social channels. (And as I mentioned in this exchange, it’s nice to have so many positive interactions in such an uncertain time.)īelow is a transcript of all the questions I could get to (lightly edited for length), along with my answers. As usual, Redditors asked a lot of smart questions, and it was a great opportunity to have a fact-based discussion about this pandemic and what we can do to prevent the next one. Yesterday I did a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on COVID-19.
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