Bethel Park physician answers questions related to COVID-19
For anyone who seeks answers to questions related to COVID-19, Dr. Timothy Campbell offers a particularly knowledgeable perspective.
Campbell, who serves on Bethel Park Council, is a physician who routinely responds to national disasters as part of his role as a responder with a federal disaster medical assistance team. He has been deployed twice to respond to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
On Monday, he provided a series of responses to inquiries during a presentation that the municipality carried by live stream through its Facebook page, with municipal manager Laurence Christian fielding the questions. The following are excerpts from the 45-minute program.
- Who is the most at risk?
Hands down, it’s the patients who have a history of heart, lung, kidney disease. They seem to be at higher risk of COVID infections than anyone else. Recent suggestions also indicate that older people are at higher risk across the board. And a lot of that is because as they age, their immune system drops to some degree.
Many older adults are also likely to have some of the co-morbid health conditions that make it harder for you to cope, harder for you to recover, from an illness.
- Is there any scientific evidence that homemade masks will reduce the transmission of the illness?
Absolutely and emphatically, yes. When I wear a mask, I wear a mask to protect you. When you wear a mask, you wear a mask to protect me.
They’re basically splash guards, the homemade masks, and they’re very effective, what they can do. They’re designed to contain a cough or contain a sneeze. They prevent the disease from spreading to others.
They’re recommended pretty much to the general population, the general public, who can’t perform social distancing.
It also reminds you to quit touching your face. We’ll do it on an average of 15 times an hour, almost 300 times a day. And yes, you do it while you’re asleep.
- Are gloves effective?
We’re not sure how much of this illness is transmitted by respiratory means, by droplet transmission versus touch on surfaces. But most folks, if they cough or they sneeze, those droplets could be disseminated on a hard surface. They may persist there, data shows, anywhere from two, sometimes up to 12 hours. Some data says several days across the board, depending on the environment, depending on the surface. So gloves will help mitigate that.
We don’t need surgical sterile gloves. We just need clean gloves. That’s really all there is to it.
- From your viewpoint, what steps will be required to exit stay-at-home restrictions?
A lot of epidemiologists have been looking at this.
In the Greater Pittsburgh area, most of the models I’ve seen show that we’re going to peak with the illness probably around April 15 or 16, that we’ll have the most cases at that time. Then after that, we’re going to see a decline across the board.
The epidemiologists also look for what’s called the inflection point, the point where the curve changes, so you can see instead of us going straight up, we’re starting to flatten out the top of that curve.
And again, that seems to be in about 10 days from now, maybe two weeks from now.
I think a lot of things are going to contribute to this, when we’ll be able to reduce the stay-at-home restrictions.
One, are we seeing a decrease in the number of active cases in the community? Two, are we seeing that the hospitals have already maxed out, plateaued and started a decline with their admissions?
At that point, I think a lot of the businesses will start to open up.
- Is wiping down all groceries for decontamination necessary?
I don’t think that’s actually necessary. I certainly don’t want anybody to take a Lysol or a Clorox to (decontaminate) their carrots and their celery and their broccoli, or their pears or their apples.
Outside containers, I think that’s reasonable.
- Does the pneumonia vaccine provide any residual protection?
In the 1918 flu epidemic, a large amount of the world population died from the Spanish flu. It was the type of influenza that we typically see every year that mutates. That one was a particularly nasty strain.
In 1918, one of the largest problems was that people got secondary infections. After the virus goes through and strips out your host defenses, then people get secondary bacterial infections. And that’s what really compromised most folks across the board.
We still have secondary infections due to the virus. With COVID-19, we have not seen secondary bacterial infections.
Pneumovax, the pneumonia shot that you get, protects you against 23 different strains of pneumonia. They’re all part of the strep-pneumonia (Streptococcaceae) family.
As part of protecting you against coronavirus, no, it will not. Can it reduce your chance of getting secondary infections? Absolutely. That’s why we recommend the Pneumovax as part of the standard immunizations that folks get.
- What is a good procedure to follow when food or other items delivered?
They haven’t really done a lot of studies to look in particular at paper products or corrugated cardboard, things like that.
Use common sense. They’re going to put a lot of these inside of a bag. Do you need the bag? I’m all about recycling. I do it every day, myself. But pitch the bag. Don’t handle it anymore.
- Is there a better way to prepare for pandemics in the future?
Are there always going to be emerging highly infectious diseases? Yeah. They mutate. And as they mutate, they can affect us.
This is actually a very typical virus for causing the common flu. It causes 20% of all the flu symptoms we get every year. That’s usually not too big of a deal. But when they mutate enough that they could affect the receptors, they can replicate much more effectively, they have a higher transmission rate: That’s when we run into problems.
I was impressed by the amount of response that took place. Even when we had just 22 cases in the United States, we knew exactly where they were. We were already deploying thousands of responders, knowing this was going to take off.
We’re the best-prepared country in the world. I can say that emphatically, look you square in the eye and tell you that.
Can you always be prepared for every single contingency? No, absolutely not. We don’t know what we’re going to get.
But we’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons just with this pandemic, alone. We’ve learned the value of social isolation. We’ve learned the value of hand washing. We’ve learned the value of using your PPE (personal protective equipment), the value of disinfecting your surfaces.
And I think a lot of lessons were learned, also, as far as the economy, as far as its impact on our everyday lives, our school lives, our work lives, our family lives.
We will all be affected by pandemics in the future. But if we don’t learn from our mistakes, that’s where we really run into problems.