Many across North Carolina and the United States are still learning the effectiveness of face masks, social distancing and other methods to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. One of UNC’s top infectious disease experts recently spoke to the importance of these methods.
The last pandemic that heavily affected the United States was the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The flu virus spread quickly and killed more than 12,000 Americans, but researchers have since developed a long-term plan to combat it and developed a vaccine.
For COVID-19, however, a vaccine may be months away and the virus has killed more than 128,000 Americans so far.
Dr. Myron Cohen is the director of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases and is known around the world as a renowned expert on viruses like COVID-19.
“If you had said in December that a coronavirus would dominate the planet for the next six months, it would’ve been unbelievable,” he says. “But the SARS-CoV-2 organism has clearly emphasized our fragilities and weaknesses.”
Cohen says the good news is that combating this virus can be done in the same way as prior pandemics. He says there are three steps to dealing with outbreaks like COVID-19 that both society and the medical community must take. The two later steps are developing drugs to interrupt the virus’ progression in sick patients and eventually developing a vaccine to prevent its spread altogether.
While researchers are progressing to achieve both of those things, Cohen says the first step in the process is one everyone can work on immediately: behavior changes. He says adapting our everyday lives with actions that reduce the risk of infection will create the ‘new normal’ needed to slow down the coronavirus. Wearing masks when in public, keeping physical distance between others and increased handwashing are the best way to directly combat COVID-19’s spread.
“All of this clearly works,” Cohen says, “because we have an experimental model in Asia. They did these things, there were no magic bullets and they’ve benefited dramatically from those behavior changes. We, in the United States, for a variety of reasons, have had trouble being compliant with these necessary risk-reduction changes.”
Cohen says those steps should be adopted by everyone for the foreseeable future. But there have been problems with full compliance, as many people across the country either decline, protest against or simply do not know these changes.
These reactions, according to Cohen, are not that surprising.
“It is not that easy to either inspire or require the risk-reduction behaviors appropriate to the new normal,” he says. “Our new normal right now is we’re being asked to do a thing inconsistent with the general behavior of our species.”
Governor Roy Cooper’s mask requirement implemented last week is an attempt to make one behavioral change more widespread, as North Carolina continues to see its coronavirus cases rise. He’s being faced with lawsuits and defiance from some over the executive order, while other areas have already adopted such public health guidelines.
Cohen says communication from all levels of leadership has been a cause of failing to adapt lifestyles and leading to more positive coronavirus cases.
“The increase in transmission reflects our inability to communicate essential behavior changes,” says Cohen. “I think Governor Cooper’s number one goal is to have enough resources to help people understand the benefit of these behavior changes while we’re waiting for better biological tools.”
Cohen says in line with Cooper’s executive orders, businesses recently reopened should not neglect public health guidelines like mask and distancing requirements just because their closure is finished. As the virus is still here and spreading, the same individual precautions taken in Phase 1 must be taken in the current phase and future ones.
“The reopening doesn’t abandon the rule that governs the virus,” says Cohen, “our reopening rules are decisions we’re making for our society. The virus doesn’t care about that. But since we know the rules of the virus, we have to obey those rules while we also obey the rules of our local and federal government.”
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