The virus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19, has infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands of people globally, has forced countries to lock down, people to stay at home, students and workers to work remotely, businesses to close their doors and has changed the way people now interact with each other.
When The New School moved all classes online for the rest of the semester, many students left New York City without knowing when they would be back but others still remain in their dorms and apartments braving the city’s epidemic.
The situation surrounding the coronavirus changes rapidly every day, week, and month, and there are still many questions left unanswered. We asked students to submit to us any lingering questions they had about COVID-19 to be answered by virologist Vincent Racaniello, a Higgins professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Racaniello teaches a virology course at Columbia in the spring and hosts a weekly podcast, This Week in Virology, where he discusses the latest on the new coronavirus.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was conducted via ZOOM on May 2, 2020 by reporter Elia Griffin.
The most common question that I got from students was, “When do you think that this will be over?” The last time we talked, you predicted the end of May, and so it’s the beginning of May now. It seems that many people are sick of being home.
Yes, of course. But we have to balance being home with being safe. I still think that by the end of May and beginning of June there is going to be significantly reduced transmission. If you look at the curves for most countries, they are going down. New York City is going down and New Jersey. So that means the sheltering has worked. Now, states are planning reopening and many states already have. New Jersey and New York, I think, are planning [on May 15] to reopen businesses. But not fully, you can’t just go back immediately.
If you’re asking me, “When can we go back to life as it was?” It’s going to be a while until we can start to get out of our homes. My feeling is the virus [transmissions] will be really low by the end of May. In the summer it’s going to stay low but there will still be virus around. There could be infections here and there, but I don’t think there will be huge numbers. But, it’s going to come back in November-ish again, because that’s winter, and that’s when these things circulate even more.
Students were also wondering about when and if schools will be able open up. Because you are a professor at Columbia University, what are your expectations with how colleges will need to adapt next semester if they’re going to open and not do remote learning?
It depends on what the circulation is by August and September. If it’s really low, then I think we can have our normal classes. But, we have to keep an eye on the transmissions because when it starts to go up in October and November, then I think we will have to take precautions.
We may have to spread out in classrooms, we may have to wear face masks. That would probably be a really good thing. I think colleges should stockpile face masks at the end of the summer, which should be obtainable. Give one out to every student because that will really help cut down transmission.
Maybe you have to think of breaking up classes or make smaller numbers of students per class or session. Or, get creative if you don’t have space. Half the class one day watches it in their dorm on Zoom, and then the other half of the time you’re in class. Maybe we have to do things like that, because we should minimize people-to-people interactions until this is really over.
Some students were wondering, what is your opinion on states starting to reopen?
I think it’s suspect. Georgia opened really early [on April 24]. I think many states have problems with businesses not operating and people unemployed and this is a big burden on the state and they want to get past that, and I understand that, but we should be safe. What are we going to do if we suddenly have more outbreaks? Are they going to close again, in the states? I don’t think so. I think people are going to get infected.
I think the hospitals are now in a pretty good shape where they can handle more patients. But, I think it’s not a great idea. I wish they would wait a little bit longer, but it’s up to them, obviously, not me. If it were me, I would wait until you have two weeks of declining hospital admissions. That’s really the key because we can measure that. We can’t really measure how many infections there are because we’re not screening enough. If they [hospital admissions] have gone down for two weeks, I would say then you could start opening up. Opening up, meaning gradually.
I got a few questions from students wondering if the virus will just go away by the time summer hits because of the heat. Can you explain whether this is true or not?
In the summer what happens is it gets a lot warmer and you get higher humidity, which means there’s more water in the air, and both of those things will reduce virus transmission, but not 100%. There will still be virus around.
The heat inactivates the virus and hot temperature breaks up the virus particles and then they won’t infect you anymore. As we’re coughing and speaking, we expel these droplets that carry the virus and they go a couple of feet. That’s why we say stay six feet away from other people if you want to talk to them. But in the humid summer, those droplets absorb water and they fall to the ground even faster because they’re bigger and heavier. In a foot or two they’re on the ground, so they have a very low chance of transmitting because usually you’re not a foot away from other people.
So, transmission goes down in the summer, however, it doesn’t go to zero. I want to really make that clear. You can’t say, “Oh, if I go to Florida, I’m not going to get infected.” You could if you encountered the virus. If someone shook your hand and they had just had it [virus] on their fingers, you could still get it even though it’s hot and humid.
Did the virus come from pangolins?
Pangolins are a critically endangered small mammal from Africa and Asia that are covered in protective scales.
No, it did not. The pangolin coronavirus is similar but it [SARS-CoV-2] is not close enough to have come from them. It probably came from a bat. That’s more likely and exactly how that happened is not yet known, but it will be found out for sure. I think people will figure it out over the next few months. A part of it is doing a lot of wildlife surveillance to see what viruses are in animals that could be a threat.
One of the organizations that does that, Eco Health Alliance, just had their funding cut off by the U.S., because they work in China and we [the U.S.] don’t want to give money to China because we want to blame them, that it is their virus. Which is so crazy. It’s just ridiculous.
If you have already had COVID-19, is it still possible to get infected a second time?
I think, if you have the disease [COVID-19], you’re going to be immune. You might get infected next year, but it will be a very mild disease and won’t have any of those fatal cases at all, even older people. That’s why a vaccine would be good because we can immunize older people so they don’t get infected, even if it doesn’t protect them 100%, they won’t get sick.
The word ‘infection’ has most people think it is ‘sick,’ they equated it with being sick, but when I think of ‘infection,’ it just means the virus gets in you, getting sick is a separate issue. The virus can infect you but you might not get sick.
I read a few weeks ago that the virus has now mutated over 30 times. If you were first infected by one mutation of the virus would you still be immune to SARS-CoV-2?
Yes, you would be, because these mutations don’t really affect your immunity at all. For all the coronaviruses that we know of, there has never been any mutation that evades your immunity. I think this is going to happen with this virus. One infection or one vaccination is going to protect you, and you’re not going to get sick. You might get infected, but you won’t get sick.
What is the possibility of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 coming back again?
There will be another one for sure. I don’t know if it will spread as much, but there will be one and we have to be ready next time, which we were not this time. We could have been ready and this is what we should be ready for: the next one. We should have drugs ready for coronas because that’s the biggest threat. So there are always going to be new viruses because as our population grows, we travel, we encroach on animals, we change environments, we are always going to have new viruses infect us.
How does a vaccine work? How long do you think it’ll be before there is a widespread distribution of an FDA approved vaccine?
Right now there are 80 different vaccines being developed, and they’re all different but they all work in a similar way. That is, you give people a modified form of the virus that does not make you sick. Which is injected in your arm muscle, but it’s prepared in different ways. Then you [your body] would make an immune response against it and you would make immune memories so it [the vaccine] would last a long time. So, you would have antibodies against the virus. Then, if you got infected the virus would get in you and either it’s not going to be able to reproduce at all or, if it does, it won’t make you sick because you’ve been vaccinated. Basically, the vaccine gives you immunity against the virus without making you sick. I think we’ll have multiple ones available probably next spring, or summer. In time for fall 2021.
The problem is, how is everybody going to get it? Are we going to have enough for everybody? We want to immunize, just in the U.S., 300 million people.
Some companies are actually building up capacity [of vaccines] right now, in gambling that it will work. So they will have enough to give everyone because it takes time to make many millions of doses. Multiple companies are going to be making vaccines so they’ll each have a certain capacity and together it can cover a lot of people.
But the logistics of giving it to people; if you’re going to think about it, how many people can you immunize in a day? 300 million people could take a long time. I suppose that’s going to be handled on a state basis. These are really good questions because the logistics are not just straightforward.
A lot of people had questions about antibodies and antibody testing. Can you explain what an antibody is?
So an antibody is a protein that we make. It’s part of our immune response when something foreign comes in us, a virus or bacteria, even stuff you eat, sometimes we make antibodies against. They are big proteins that circulate in your blood that go into tissues, and they clamp down on viruses and prevent them from infecting. So they’re defensive, they’re really good. An antibody means that you have been infected with a virus. If it’s in you, and we can detect, that means sometime in the past, in the last few weeks, or months or years, it can tell you that you’ve had SARS-CoV-2, for example.
Can you explain what an antibody test is and what the results mean?
Because the antibodies last for years in you they are a sign of if you have been infected in the past. They are very useful to say how many people in New York have been infected. You can do a survey, you don’t have to test everyone, just a certain percent of the population and you can then extrapolate it to the whole population. Right now, those are what we are rolling out, many different antibody tests where you have to take a little bit of your blood. It can be done with a little pinprick.
There are tests you can do at home where you get these little cartridges where you put the blood at one end and it moves through it. Kind of like a pregnancy test, you would get a line if you have antibodies against the coronavirus. It develops very quickly. They’re not 100% accurate and that’s a problem because even if they’re only 90 percent accurate, 10 percent error is not good.
One student notes that New York City was conducting antibody tests, saying that the tests have shown that many people in the city have already had the virus. They were wondering if this is good or bad?
Oh, it’s good if you’ve had it [the virus] — it’s great. We know this because 80% of infections are mild and you don’t even know you’re infected. So people got infected long before the shutdown in New York and they didn’t even get sick so they didn’t go to a hospital or a doctor. Which is good, and now they’re immune. If they get infected again, it would be really mild. So it’s good that we have more people infected than we thought. We’d like it to be 50, 60, 70 percent [immunity] because then the virus would have a lot of trouble circulating.
What are some misconceptions that you see in news outlets or the public promoting?
One is this idea that you can get reinfected within a week or two, which came out of South Korea, and that’s wrong and they admitted it.
The other big one is that this virus came from a lab in China. The President [Donald Trump] just said this week he has evidence. No one else has evidence, but he has evidence that it came from a lab in China. It doesn’t. It did not come either on purpose or accidentally from a lab in China. It came from a bat. It came from nature. It is very clear scientific evidence, and I don’t care what anyone else has. It doesn’t trump the science. To blame China is ridiculous. This is everybody’s problem, so let’s just solve it together.
There have been some stories in the news, that we didn’t have to actually shut down and it wasn’t necessary to do social distancing and shelter-in-place, and that’s just totally wrong. There’s no country where no one sheltered in place. Every country has done something. South Korea sheltered, and they stopped it. China did an amazing thing, they sheltered three quarters of a billion people and they stopped it. No question.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was conducted via ZOOM on May 2, 2020 by reporter Elia Griffin.