By B.L. Wilson
Leaders from George Washington University’s School of Nursing, School of Medicine and Health Sciences and Milken Institute School of Public Health held a virtual town hall Thursday in conjunction with the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to answer questions from Northern Virginia residents about COVID-19. The virtual town hall was livestreamed on Facebook.
Loudoun County Algonkian District Supervisor Juli E. Briskman, whose district includes the GW Virginia Science and Technology campus, said she was impressed with the staff and facilities at the VSTC in Ashburn, Va., and invited GW health and medical experts to address concerns residents have about COVID-19.
Pamela Jeffries, dean of the GW School of Nursing, served as moderator of the Loudoun County Virtual Town Hall on Pandemic Response: COVID-19 Thursday afternoon.
“The university is invested in the health of the community and battling and overcoming this unprecedented health care crisis,” she said, opening the discussion.
In the first presentation, Gary Simon, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences, reviewed symptoms of COVID-19, which he said is “highly contagious through droplets as well as airborne…and is characterized by cough and then by fever.
“It hurts to breathe,” he said. “There’s some discussion whether it may be better to tolerate the pain and breathe deeply a little bit to help prevent secondary pneumonia.”
If patients who are tested have the virus and their oxygenation is good—meaning they have a sufficient level of oxygen and are not breathless and not too ill--they are sent home, told to go to isolate in a room by themselves and have no close contacts with other people, he said.
“There are no definite therapies at this point,” Dr. Simon said.
Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are being studied, but he cautioned people against taking them at this point because they “can lead to a serious and fatal arrhythmia and abnormal cardiac rhythm.”
A number of other drugs and therapies are also being studied, he said, including how long patients should be kept on ventilators.
“We will probably get a successful drug to treat this before we get a vaccine,” Dr. Simon said, with the earliest vaccine not likely before 2021.
Lynn Goldman, the Michael and Lori Milken Dean of the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health, noted that COVID-19 is a virus that has never been seen before in the human population. “It has been very difficult to predict exactly what will happen any [one place in the world],” she said. “So rather than predicting, we are preparing.”
Many of the measures already undertaken to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, such as staying at home and closing schools and nonessential businesses, she said, have made a huge difference in reducing community transmission of the virus.
The latest recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that people wear masks, though not the N95 ones that are needed for health care workers, Dr. Goldman said. She demonstrated for viewers of the virtual town hall how to make a simple mask by folding and stapling a vacuum cleaner bag. More important than wearing masks, she said, is washing your hands before you put on and take off the mask.
Viewer questions were a substantial portion of the virtual town hall.
One viewer asked why “social distancing” was being used as the public health approach as opposed to isolating infected persons, which has been effective in South Korea.
Without sufficient availability of tests in the United States, Dr. Goldman said, people are not being tested until they show symptoms. “We know there are many other people in the population who could have very mild symptoms or not even yet have symptoms and be spreading it,” she said.
A viewer voiced concerns that retirement communities appear to be slow in adopting public health measures such as social distancing, Ms. Briskman, the Loudoun County supervisor, said the county health department might consider conducting town halls for these communities.
Another viewer asked whether everyone with the virus develops a fever or could have symptoms for only a few days.
“Not everyone has a temperature over 100 degrees,” said Dr. Simon. “Only about 45 percent have a fever. In a couple of cases, people seemed to get better very quickly. But that’s rare.”
Of those tested so far, just 10 to 20 percent had the virus. Most people are testing negative, he said.
Dr. Goldman urged people not to go for tests unless they are very ill because they would be putting themselves at risk for exposure.
In response to a question about why schools needed to close if young people are less susceptible to infection from the novel coronavirus, Dr. Goldman said that there hasn’t been enough research to determine children’s immunity to the virus. She added that it is known that children can transmit the infection to others.
People who recover from COVID-19 will have some immunity to it, but scientists don’t know how long that immunity will last. “It is not going to be like protection with measles where you have it once, and that’s the end of it,” Dr. Simon said.
There is no evidence that transmission of COVID-19 will have stopped by the fall in this country, according to Dr. Goldman, even if we start to see a downward trend.
“In California where the rate of transmission has gone way down there is still transmission going on,” Dr. Goldman said. “There are still new cases every day.”