Consider This from NPR - Testing Holds States Back; Vaccine Timeline

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

According to new White House guidelines, a state, city, or county has to show a decreasing rate of confirmed coronavirus cases for 14 days before reopening their economy. A year may seem like a long time to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, but vaccine development typically takes longer. NPR's Joe Palca explains why it's so hard and what researchers are doing to speed things up.Food banks around the country have been stretched, including one in San Antonio. Last week it served 10,000 families, many of whom are dealing with joblessness and food insecurity caused by the pandemic. Plus, the man who developed the N95 mask filter technology comes out of retirement.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

A hundred days ago Saturday, the World Health Organization announced the discovery of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. Since then, it has killed 150,000 people around the world, nearly a quarter of them here in the United States. I know there are a lot of other considerations that go into opening, considerations that you've heard of right from this podium. But the dominating drive of this was to make sure that this is done in the safest way possible. Dr. Anthony Fauci at the White House Thursday said new federal guidelines for states to reopen in three phases are grounded in science. Those guidelines also reveal just how far we have to go before things go back to something like the way they were before.

You want to call it the new normal. You can call it whatever you want. But even if you are in phase one, two, three, it's not okay, game over, it's not. Coming up, the latest on a timeline for a vaccine and how a food bank copes when people in thousands of cars line up for hours. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. 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. The White House laid out a three-phase plan to reopen the economy. Phase one, in a lot of ways, will look pretty familiar. Again, we're asking for all vulnerable individuals shelter in place. Again, we're asking for the public to continue to maximize physical distance, staying home if you are sick, and again, minimize all non-essential travel. But Dr. Deborah Birx explained there's one thing a city, a county, or state should have before it even considers this phase one reopening, and that is a decreasing rate of confirmed cases for 14 days.

14 days of decreasing evidence of illness. Right now, no place in America comes close to qualifying. And the White House does not say when any might. We did not put a timeline on any of the phases. We want the governors with the data that they have, community by community, to be setting up those timelines. And a big part of that data needs to come from testing. Areas of our country that have been hot spots have done much more testing on a per capita basis than South Korea.

We've done more than South Korea. The U.S. is now on par with South Korea when it comes to per capita testing. But South Korea started its testing earlier, when its infection rate was much lower. The U.S. got a late start, leading to a steeper rise in cases. And so, as the president shifts more responsibility for testing on to the governors to catch up, some say they can't do it alone. The president doesn't want to help on testing. Andrew Cuomo in New York said he has pressed the president on testing.

I said the one issue we need help with is testing. He said 11 times, I don't want to get involved in testing. It's too complicated. It's too hard. The testing chemicals and supplies that are needed in states, Cuomo said, are made in testing. It's too complicated. It's too hard. The testing chemicals and supplies that are needed in states, Cuomo said, are made in China. And China is now in a position where they're being asked globally for these reagent chemicals. And that is a piece of the equation that I can't figure out. And that's why the federal government has to be part of this answer. 3.4 million tests have been done in the United States since the outbreak started here in January. Conservative estimates are that we will need

750,000 tests per week to end this crisis. So staying at home is all about outlasting the coronavirus. Along with handwashing, it is the best tool we have until there is a safe, reliable vaccine. You've probably heard that could take another year at least. So why does it take so long? NPR's Joe Palka told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that might be the wrong way to think about it. The real question is, how come it's going so fast? Because in the past, it used to take five to 10 years to make a vaccine, and now people are talking about a year or 18 months.

Okay, so does that mean we're just all being wildly optimistic, or have scientists really found some way to speed up the timeline? Yeah, they really have. I mean, in the old days, what used to happen is if you knew a virus was causing a disease, you'd have to isolate the virus, you'd have to grow it in the lab, you'd have to modify it, you'd have to formulate it into some sort of a vaccine, but you'd all be doing steps that take a long time. You can't tell a virus grow faster. But now in the world of DNA, the virus sequence, or in this case, RNA sequence of the virus, came out almost weeks after the virus was identified. And what that means is, Steve, they can identify the part of the virus that causes the immune response, because that's all you're interested in. You don't want the whole virus in a vaccine.

You want the virus part. They were able to isolate that fairly rapidly, and it's a protein that they can work with. Okay, so if they're rapidly able to identify the protein that's the key to defeating this thing, why would it be so hard to then find the way to defeat it? Okay, so the thing is, as I said, you put the protein into a human being, and the human being's immune system recognizes the protein and starts to mount an immune response. But you can't just take the protein and shove it into a needle and put it into somebody's arm. You have to package it in a way that the immune system will see it for long enough so that it'll begin to make an immune response.

And there are a number of ways to put that protein into a person. You could just put it in as an injectable patch. Some people think that might work. You could put it into an inactivated virus that'll make copies of it once it's inside of you. You could put it into what's called a DNA vaccine. So the DNA that makes that protein goes into somebody's arm and hijacks the person's cells a little bit like a virus does to make just the protein. You can put in RNA. You can give them a pill. There's just a variety of different approaches that people are going to try. And they will all take time, I suppose. You're reminding us here that a vaccine doesn't

necessarily destroy a virus directly. It gets the body to go after the virus in the proper way. That's right. What is the optimal kind of vaccine? Well, you want one that's safe. You want one that generates a strong and lasting immune response. You need to be able to manufacture it. Sometimes you come up with a brilliant idea of how to package the virus and you just can't make it at a scale that would be useful. You want to have a vaccine that doesn't require special handling.

You don't want to have to keep it in a cold storage the entire time until it goes into somebody's arm. You want to make sure that you don't have to administer it more than once. You want to make it easy to administer, maybe a shot. What about a nasal spray or maybe just taking a pill? Is somebody close to testing on people? Yeah, there's actually three companies testing on people. Two are still on the stage where they're looking only to see if it's safe. And one, a Chinese firm, is actually gone to the next stage where they're looking for safety and maybe a bit of seeing if it generates an immune response as well. NPR's Joe Palka talking to Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. People in thousands of cars waited hours in line at a food bank in San Antonio last week. You might have seen the drone photo that was going around the Internet.

And the people in those cars included some of the more than 22 million Americans who are now newly unemployed. They've been laid off because of this pandemic. NPR's John Burnett reports lines at food banks around the country are only getting longer every week. A huge food warehouse on the outskirts of San Antonio is stacked four stories high with apples, oranges, and watermelons, potatoes, tomatoes, and onions, chicken, ground beef and tater tots. A quartet of forklifts working like soldier ants is filling a truck with pallets of carrots. We stock refrigerated, frozen, non-perishable and non-food items.

So it moves through our facility at a fairly rapid pace. Obviously, now in the midst of COVID-19, the demand is far outpacing the supply. Eric Cooper is CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank. In addition to feeding the hungry in this city of more than two million souls, it supplies 500 food pantries throughout South Texas. In a normal week, the food bank feeds about 60,000 people in its region. Today, that number has doubled. Last week, they knew they'd be busy. A record 6,000 families had pre-registered for food distribution at a sprawling flea market parking lot. When word got out on social media, 4,000 more cars showed up. I panicked. I've never seen a line that long. And so I called our warehouse to send more trucks to get more food on site. But we, in the end, served 10,000 families.

Eric Cooper estimates half of the people coming to the food bank these days are first-timers. They're mothers like Erica Campos, a 42-year-old bank employee with two young daughters at home. She was doing okay. Her job was stable. She even bought a home late last year. But she really depended on $1,200 a month in child support from her ex-husband. Then he lost his job as a hotel concierge because of the coronavirus shutdown, and his checks stopped.

Compost could no longer make ends meet. I never ever could have even imagined anything like this. She drives a nice car and wears stylish eyeglasses over her face mask. So I mean I was very almost ashamed to be honest to even pick up food from the food bank. Somebody might look at my used Cadillac and be like what is she doing in the food bank line, you know? But I had to get past those feelings of shame. There's no shame in feeding my children. With other natural disasters, you might expect to see regional hardship in strained food banks. But the economic cataclysm that has followed coronavirus has spread out the suffering around the planet.

So what we're seeing at the San Antonio Food Bank, Feeding America food banks are seeing all over the country. Zayina Villarreal is with Feeding America, a network of 200 of the nation's food banks, including San Antonio's. The pandemic is showing the fragility of families' household budgets. With one lost paycheck, many families are figuring out how to put food on the table. This morning, the San Antonio Food Bank has set up another distribution center, and officials hazard to guess how many folks will be there. Dozens parked overnight and slept in their cars to be sure they'd get some groceries.

And PR's John Burnett. The N95 mask has become a precious, life-saving thing during this pandemic. I developed the technology in 1992. Peter Tsai invented the mask's special filters that block out viral particles. This is just a very common invention, not a very special invention. But the mask is designed for one-time use. And because hospitals are running low, Tsai recently came out of retirement. Researchers, they call me and send me emails. Researchers have asked him if he can find a way to safely disinfect the mask without degrading it.

I told Peter, you seem to be the man of the hour. And he said, no, I'm man of the minute. Tsai's colleague, Maha Krishnamurti, thinks he deserves the attention. I did not expect to be popular. I just want to help people and just do my job. Peter Tsai talked to producer Matt Kwong for NPR's Morning Edition. Saturday here on the podcast, like we did last weekend, we will have an episode with public health experts and NPR journalists answering listener questions about the pandemic. And we'll be back with a regular episode on Monday. This podcast is produced by Gabriela Saldivia, Anne Lee, and Brent Bachman and edited by Beth Donovan.

You guys are the best. Thanks for listening. I'm Kelly McEvers.