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Dr. Calvin Sun, Founder and CEO of The Monsoon Diaries and Clinical Assistant Professor and Attending Physician of Emergency Medicine in the majority of New York City emergencies and hospital systems, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the latest updates on coronaviruses.
Video transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Good news on the coronavirus front here in the United States, nearly 29% of adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccines. But on the other hand, cases in the United States have increased by around 19% in the past two weeks. In New York, according to the “New York Times”, the figures are even more alarming, up 64% in the past two weeks. There is therefore definitely a race between this increase in the number of cases and the need to vaccinate the population.
Dr. Calvin Sun is joining us now. He is the founder and CEO of The Monsoon Diaries. He is also a clinical assistant professor and attending physician in emergency medicine in the majority of emergency rooms and hospital systems in New York City. In other words, he toured the city while this was all going on. Dr Sun, how do you see this balance now? I mean, I have to admit, I haven’t looked at the numbers in New York for a little while, and I’m shocked at the increase there has been over the past two weeks. What is happening?
CALVIN SOLEIL: It’s a race against time. I feel like I’m in a movie. It’s like a superhero movie where we get one thing that works for us, and then the villain gets even more powerful, and we come and go. It is literally neck and neck, a photo arrived at the finish line where, who is going to look for us? Will this be a permanent pandemic, or are we going to turn this into something seasonal or hopefully smallpox, which I don’t think, at this rate, will happen. We’re going to continue to have superhero and villain movies for the rest of eternity if people still go to places like, you know, I’m not going to say which states, but places that don’t. of mask warrant and then come back.
And we are seeing a huge wave of positive cases. I think if you look at my social media and Instagram I think I posted twice, because I usually don’t, but I got posted twice what was heard in our emergency rooms and our emergency care centers and testing sites, I’ve never seen so many positive cases in a month, or there are a lot of positive cases in a day, and that was just yesterday after a shift of 16 hours. We have seen it since Friday and Thursday especially, since last Friday and Thursday. On top of that, even though many people get vaccinated, there is still a subgroup of people who either refuse to get vaccinated or have not yet been vaccinated, and because it’s so close, it does. , as they say, is seizure fatigue. We have stopped checking the numbers, people are infected again.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Doctor, Anjalee here. I know we are sort of faced with a kind of still politicized environment where yesterday you saw Dr Wolynski very moved about his plea to keep everyone patient, calm and keep following the rules. And President Joe Biden is telling states to stay, or rather reinstate, masked mandates. How do you deal with that now, and how do you get the message across when we’re pretty much, as you said, already on this path?
CALVIN SOLEIL: I think we’ve seen so far in this whole pandemic is that unfortunately when people are in a place of fear they act on emotions rather than logic, totally understandable that is a human conditional response. And therefore, people can only be turned or convinced otherwise by an emotional argument. And what we saw yesterday was someone who certainly and what we needed most from doctors, public health officials, and healthcare workers, was the emotional response, than it is something that will affect you emotionally, your families, your loved ones. All of this data and logic and why we should be doing something doesn’t resonate, because people in a place of fear are not going to accept logical arguments.
Same with the way people vote. People vote based on an emotional response, and not all the data and logic in the world is going to pass it on, and I think that’s what we saw yesterday when we’re so desperate that all languages love that we are used to using, which is logical and given and being very informative, now needs to be converted into something of our human element. Because at the end of the day healthcare workers are humans too, and if there is a way to reach people emotionally – because at this point every little bit counts so that we don’t have to. not to be locked in this eternal battle between good and evil, this pandemic. I think that’s what we’ve seen, and I think that’s what I use to reach my patients. Because at the end of the day, they’ll be making decisions based on emotions and not necessarily based on what the data says.
JULIE HYMAN: Dr Sun, forgive me, but I’m still trying to figure it out. So you mentioned Texas and the lack of a mask warrant, although we’ve heard that most companies still need masks. New York still has a mask warrant, New Jersey still has a mask warrant, case in this state I’m up 20%. Michigan, I was just looking at the numbers, it still has a mask tenure, and the numbers have more than doubled in the past two weeks. So since it’s not – there’s something else going on here. And I don’t know if it’s just that people let their guard down, maybe they’re still masked, maybe it’s the variants. I’m just trying to understand why the numbers are going up so much.
CALVIN SOLEIL: So there are three things going on there. One is the variants. People are re-infecting themselves again. You know how many times I have heard, not yet, from people who have been infected before I tell them that they are positive again with symptoms and a lack of smell. Number two is a half-enthusiastic response. Mask mandates can’t do much, but not all companies apply them and only half of them are or 3/4, which is partial.
It’s like only vaccinating 80% of the population. That 20% is going to be re-infected, create a new variant, recombine, and then we have to start all over. We are not all safe until everyone is safe. And finally, three is the journey. Most of the people I’ve told have been positive lately since last Friday and Thursday are, oh yeah, I was on a plane. Where do you come from? And it’s usually one of four or five handfuls of states.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Doctor, I wonder about this travel point and just kind of a general failure to follow the rules so strictly. You know, we’ve been talking about it, we’ve been talking for a year about what the easy steps are to avoid infection and avoid re-infection. And it seems that in some areas part of the problem is that people don’t necessarily know someone who has been affected by the virus or they have recovered fairly quickly. So there is also this feeling that the virus is not as bad and that there are a lot more people at low risk in the country than at high risk, and so it’s OK if we just get infected. .
CALVIN SOLEIL: It’s a decision they have to live with. I always tell them you can do whatever you want. No one is forcing you to stay home, no one is forcing you to quarantine. This is based on your ethical guidelines on what you think is right and wrong. But when something bad happens, it’s on you. When you infect other people. You have blind spots. There is no way you will know specifically who you are infecting. You cough or sneeze in the air and leave this place. The virus can live in the air for minutes to hours. People can just go through a revolving door and inhale whatever you sneeze or vice versa.
People don’t have this ability to see beyond themselves, especially when they’re scared during a pandemic, because they’re so focused on self-preservation. And I have that feeling, but unfortunately we’re in a place where we have to take care of each other and help each other, because that’s the only way to overcome this by working together. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And we don’t really work together as much as I would like.
It’s so unacceptable to me that people make decisions without thinking of their fellow men and women and other people, because they’re so focused on trying to, you know, get back to everything. what they think they are entitled to. So I think in order for us to really contain this thing, we need to be more aware of what other people are going through and how that can affect other people who can re-infect themselves, mutate, and then re-infect them with something. ‘even more dangerous. If people could think this far ahead of time or if we could challenge this in people even emotionally, I think it will make a huge difference.
It’s like sexually transmitted diseases as we said at the time. The safest thing is abstinence, not going out at all. But that’s not practical for most people, so we encourage protection, protect wisely. Do not wear your mask under your nose. It’s not wearing it right, and of course you’re going to have consequences if you don’t do it right, halfway, if you will.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Speaking of which, I know there was a lot of talk about yesterday’s vaccination report from the CDC confirming the effectiveness of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, but also the idea that the first vaccine is almost as effective as some of the other vaccines. in two doses. Do you have any concerns about this report or just the idea of looking at just one dose? What do you think about this?
CALVIN SOLEIL: So I always tell people that something is better than nothing. But if you are going to take an unnecessary risk, such as taking just one dose instead of what the data shows for two doses to be effective, if something bad happens to you with just having one dose in you instead of two and as expected, you’re all alone. There is no data available to help you yet, especially during these times, in case something bad happens to you to catch COVID in a single dose. There might be trend data, maybe theoretical data, but it’s not peer-reviewed with good potency, double-blind control, and placebo in the same way as both doses.
So you will be on your own with more doctors and healthcare workers, I really don’t know what to do with that as that is not what the data is supported by. So if you can, take two doses. But unfortunately we live in practical times so if the supply is not there I fully understand that getting a dose is better than nothing what we are looking at in the UK and its data. But at the moment it hasn’t been fully proven yet, you know, the same as Pfzier and Moderna with two doses where it’s very encouraging. But right now, would you really want to take that unnecessary risk and be alone if you don’t have to?
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