Consider This from NPR - Coronavirus Not Going Away Before Next Fall, Fauci Says

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci said we will still be dealing with the coronavirus next fall. The severity depends on what we do over the next few months.What about college campuses? NPR's Elissa Nadworny reports universities are figuring out if they can reopen for fall semester or go virtual.Plus, a study finds wearing a nylon stocking over homemade masks can boost protection.And a look at why COVID-19 seems to be killing more men than women. Find and support your local public radio stationSign up for 'The New Normal' newsletterThis episode was recorded and published as part of this podcast's former 'Coronavirus Daily' format.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The pandemic has killed nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. and caused more than 26 million people to lose their jobs. We have undertaken the largest, most comprehensive study of New York State to find out what is the infection rate. Governor Andrew Cuomo says 21 percent of people who were tested in New York City had coronavirus antibodies. That's a lot higher than was expected. And we should say it's after just one preliminary study. Cuomo says more testing is needed. If people could have the flu or could have COVID in the fall and they don't know which it is,

they could get nervous and start going into the health care system. Coming up, what happens in the fall with the virus and with college students and why COVID-19 seems to be killing more men. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It is Thursday, April 23rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. At the White House Wednesday. If the corona even comes back, and he doesn't know that it's going to or neither do I, we spoke... President Trump said several times...

You may not even have corona coming back, just so you understand. ...that the coronavirus might be gone by the fall. What it is estimated might not come back at all, Jeff. It may not come back at all. At the same briefing, at the same lectern, 38 minutes later... We will have coronavirus in the fall. Dr. Anthony Fauci said it's not going anywhere. I am convinced of that. And how bad it is depends on what we do over the next few months. If we do, which we won't, but let's take an imaginary period. We say, okay, coronavirus, forget about it. We're not going to do anything about it. It will take off. That's what viruses do. But that's not what's going to happen.

This discrepancy started with CDC Director Robert Redfield. It wasn't about something he said, but a headline about his comments in The Washington Post. What he said was the coronavirus would be much more difficult to deal with in the fall. That's because, unlike this spring, in the fall, the virus will be present at the height of the flu season, when hospital capacity is already limited. You were accurately quoted, correct? I'm accurately quoted in the Washington Post. As difficult, but the headline was there.

So anyway, back to Anthony Fauci's point about what is going to be done between now and the fall. So what has happened is that the mitigation that we... Social distancing, he says, has worked. It is the basis for our being able to say that we can now think seriously about reopening America. The plan to reopen America calls for more testing, for thousands and thousands of people to track and isolate those who test positive, and for businesses to make big changes to how they protect employees and customers. All that needs to be carefully put into place before it is safe to reopen widely.

I plead with the American public, with the governors, with the mayors, for the people with responsibility. Although I know one has the need to leapfrog over things, don't do that. Fauci seemed to be talking directly to leaders like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who told many businesses in his state they could reopen this Friday. President Trump said he wouldn't do it so soon. Would I do that? No. I'd keep him a little longer. I want to protect people's lives.

But I'm going to let him make his decision. But I told him I totally disagree. Thank you, Mr. President. The vice president in his remarks was talking about the federal efforts. Colleges and universities were among the first major institutions to close down early this spring. And now they are among the first to be thinking critically about what to do in the fall. NPR's Alyssa Nadwerny talked to campus leaders about what will happen in September. It's a hard decision to make. California State University Fullerton was one of the first campuses

to acknowledge they're planning to be online in the fall. We are assuming that in the fall we will be virtual. That's the Southern California Schools Provost Pamela Oliver speaking at a virtual town hall on Monday. And of course that can change depending on the situation, depending on what happens with COVID-19. But at this point, that's what we're thinking. Other schools have been hesitant to announce their fall plans publicly, though behind the scenes, many are planning for multiple possibilities. I don't think there's any scenario under which

it's business as usual on American college campuses in the fall. Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist and physician at Yale University who's studying how coronavirus spreads. This idea that we can somehow just get back to normal and go back to school in the fall because we always have is not reasonable, actually. There are several ideas on how to make these changes. Schools have floated starting later in the fall or in January. Or instead of a semester-length class, they're shortened into four-week cycles, optimizing flexibility. Another idea is to try a hybrid approach, some face-to-face classes and some online. Kim Whedon is a sociologist at Cornell University.

She set out to study this along with her colleague Benjamin Cornwell. They used enrollment data from Cornell to see how often students came into contact with each other. Essentially, how interconnected is a campus network? They were hoping that if they eliminated larger lecture classes, students would have less interaction with each other. It turns out it didn't matter. I confess that I was a little bit disappointed that we did find such tight networks and that just eliminating those 100-person or more classes didn't seem to reduce the small world nature of the network all that much. And of course, they didn't factor in campus life, dorms, sporting events, and parties. Because of these elements, residential colleges may have to make the most significant changes, while schools with larger commuter populations, including community colleges, might be less affected. But no college wants an outbreak on campus, because with risk comes liability and potentially lawsuits. That's

why colleges need to have a contingency plan ready, says Brian Alexander, an educational futurist at Georgetown University. He says schools need to face the realities of this virus. It's going to change things. And the degree depends on the shape that the pandemic takes in the fall semester. And he says colleges, which are usually quite competitive, need to start collaborating. I think if we can just get more and more college and university leaders working together, we could have a more intelligent response. The challenge is that college enrollment was already down before coronavirus.

So it's a competitive field. Every student who enrolls really counts. And there's real fear that students and their families won't be willing to pay as much for online offerings. If students don't show up in the fall, the financial hole colleges already find themselves in will only get deeper. NPR's Alyssa Nadwini. COVID-19 seems to be killing more men than women. Global Health 5050 is keeping track of the data

in dozens of countries. It's an independent initiative at University College London. Sarah Hawkes is one of its co-directors. She's worked in public health for 25 years. She talked to Morning Edition host David Green about why more men are dying. There's quite a lot of good evidence that shows that across a number of aspects that female immune systems are essentially a lot stronger. That might explain why women seem to have less severe infections and less risk of death. But that doesn't go the whole way to explaining it. Because if it's all down to biology, you might expect to see really quite similar differences between death rates in men and women

in every country. And we don't actually see that. And so we think that there's something else happening there as well. What else do you think might be at play here? Yeah. So for that, we think that this is probably down to other underlying diseases, the diseases particularly that affect the heart and the lung. And we know from global data that those diseases are more common in men. And from the work that we do, our hypothesis is that those diseases are more common in men because of the gendered behaviors of men. So a large part of the burden of heart and lung disease globally is driven by exposure to factors such as tobacco smoke and drinking alcohol and even things like air pollution. And a lot of that is very gendered behaviors. In many societies, it's men who are more likely to smoke. It's men

who are more likely to drink alcohol. And it's men who are frequently exposed to high levels of outdoor air pollution, because they are frequently the people who are driving cars, taxis, buses, trucks, whatever. What about behavior right now? I i mean is there anything that the men are doing differently you're finding i mean i don't know about if it's washing your hands less if it's being not as careful to avoid contact with with other people could anything happening in this moment be playing a role that doesn't seem to be playing as much of a role what could be playing a role and where we've seen this in other diseases including previous viral epidemics is that men have tended to seek care later

in the course of a disease than women do. So for men the obvious intervention, the obvious message there is to say you need to seek health care as soon as possible. But hopefully this will be a starting point for people to do better as far as recognizing and acting on sex and gender differences in health and medicine in the future is concerned. Sarah Hawkes from Global Health 5050 in London, talking to NPR host David Green. We know by now that a homemade mask could help slow the spread of the virus. Researchers at Northeastern University now say there's something that might make a mask more effective. I don't think there's anything special about nylon stockings. It's just having an elastic layer that is pressing the mask to the face.

Professor Loretta Fernandez says wrapping a stocking or pantyhose leg around your head to press a cloth mask tightly against your face could filter out more airborne particles. When we added a nylon stocking layer over the masks, every mask performed better, with five out of the ten homemade masks actually exceeding the standard surgical masks. So yeah, function over form. More on that research from NPR's Maria Godoy is in our episode notes. And for more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station. And if you own an Amazon Echo device, tell it to Play News from NPR.

You'll hear a mix of the latest national and international news, as well as stories from your community. That's Play News from NPR. We'll be back with more tomorrow. I'm Kelli McEvers.