WASHINGTON (CN) — When cases of Covid-19 began cropping up four months ago, Dr. Robert Gallo, the preeminent virologist who co-discovered HIV and pioneered the development of the blood test used to diagnose it, thought to himself: “Uh oh.”
“Was I shocked? No,” Gallo told Courthouse News in an interview last week. “We thought it would spill away from China. But did I expect it to be this bad in most places on earth? No.”
Deemed a global pandemic in March, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus has killed over 110,000 people worldwide and infected over a million. In the U.S., more than 530,000 cases of Covid-19 are confirmed, and 20,000 are dead, according a Johns Hopkins tracker.
The White House initially forecast the U.S. death toll to reach between 100,000 to 240,000, but after three weeks of mostly state-led social-distancing efforts, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and those counseling the White House, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, have lowered the estimate to 60,000. That prediction is also based on data compiled by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, part of University of Washington Medicine.
The revision still paints a bleak picture, however, and compounding anxieties are the uncertainties around how Americans will emerge from various states of lockdown, stay healthy and reduce the likelihood of infection, or worse, reinfection, as the possibility of vaccination is far off, many months if not years away.
What unsettles Dr. Gallo today are the memories coronavirus brings to the surface.
“Unfortunately, this virus looks like HIV. This guy too has, it’s like spike proteins,” he said, noting the thorny protuberances of the Covid-19 virus structure. “These are important targets for both viruses, because those are the things coming at your healthy cells. It’s what your immunity sees first.”
Gallo’s assessment is supported by new research in the peer-reviewed journal Cellular and Molecular Immunology. Relying on data from New York and Shanghai, the study published Sunday reveals how healthy immunity building T-cells were rendered uncharacteristically defenseless after being injected with coronavirus genes.
This does not typically occur to T-Cells in similar strains, like the SARS virus that hammered Asia in 2003, but it does occur with HIV.
For experts like Gallo, such similarities should humble those deciding how to jumpstart society, as more diverse virus testing capability comes online.
Most tests issued to Americans now are diagnostic, unable by themselves to determine a presence of antibodies, or cells created after a virus invades.
Diagnostic tests do little to get ahead of a widespread outbreak, so antibody detection through the blood, or serological testing, is a critical coupling to testing when establishing a community’s infection rate and how immunity plays out in the herd.
Knowing this makes reopening school, work and business floodgates exponentially safer, Gallo explained, and reduces the risk of restarting restrictions on public gatherings.
Ideally, people would receive a suite of tests — both diagnostic and serological — before more guidelines were lifted. People would also need to be tested at multiple points in time, he said.
For those who contracted Covid-19, they would be tested not just 24 to 72 hours after the first negative result, but again two to four, or even eight weeks later. This significantly reduces the possibility of false positives.
“If there were 100 people who were infected, and they got better, and you were able to show two weeks from the time they were feeling better that they were virus-free — and not just with an antibody test, but with a viral RNA test, too — I would feel comfortable saying, go back to work,” Gallo said. “And remember just because you are antibody positive doesn’t mean you are virus-free. ... I would like to be sure you don’t find the virus in saliva or the blood.”