Alabamians can be proud that we are home to several world-renowned organizations contributing to credible coronavirus research and education, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Huntsville-based nonprofit HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.

The following Q & A comes from a Belle Curve podcast interview with Dr. Neil Lamb, vice president for educational outreach at HudsonAlpha and creator of the popular “Shareable Science” explainer videos about the pandemic.

Note: Lamb’s answers are shortened, edited and paraphrased in places for clarity and brevity. For the entire interview, please listen to the full podcast episode.

Q: What is the most important pandemic information we need to know right now?

Lamb: “I think there are five key points. First, this period of lockdown has been very painful, but it has bought us time to slow the spread of the virus, to get our hospital case load under control and to try to identify more testing supplies and more treatment. So this was a good thing and a necessary step, but it’s not over.”

“Second, the majority of us still have no immunity to this virus. So when we do get back together, we’ve got to continue to practice social distancing and wear masks in public settings. Our job is to slow the spread of the virus. We are not going to be able to stop the spread right now, but we need to slow it at a rate that we can manage it.”

“Third, this will still be circulating among us for months. That shouldn’t cause us to drop our shoulders in despair because we are going to do everything we can to not have to go back into this period of lockdown, but we’ve got to recognize that the majority of us are still vulnerable. So we have to walk this tightrope between loosening restrictions, but still not overwhelming the systems with the spread of the virus.”

“Fourth, we’ve got to have more testing. We’ve got to be able to trace when people are infected and who else they have potentially come into contact with and test those people and then temporarily isolate them. This virus is way more infectious than the flu. Each infected person could, on average, infect two to three other people if we don’t take any measures to try to slow that spread.”

“Fifth, our collective behavior will determine what happens next. We are not powerless in this. We all have the power to shape what the next two weeks, the next two months looks like with our decisions and I think that is very empowering. We aren’t just at the mercy of this virus. Washing our hands, wearing masks in public, practicing social distancing does make a difference. We’ve seen it over the last three weeks as the estimated fatalities have dropped drastically because we have made it so hard for the virus to get a foothold and spread to other people.”

Q: Do you think homemade masks are effective?

Lamb: “Masks and face coverings help prevent the spread of the virus to us by providing at least some covering to minimize the likelihood of viral particles getting into our nose and mouth, so even cloth masks provide some protection.”

“The other important thing is that we need to be wearing masks out in public to prevent us from unintentionally spreading the virus to other people. The most unsettling thing about this virus for me is that, number one, I can spread it days before I ever develop symptoms and never know that I have infected someone else. And number two, we’re seeing at least some portion of people that are infectious that never develop symptoms.”

“So just saying, ‘Oh, I feel great. I don’t have a fever. I don’t have a cough, so I’m fine to be out in public,’ isn’t true. We need to behave as if all of us could potentially be infectious. The face covering is really a courtesy to the people around us to slow any spread that might come from us.”

Q: What are the challenges in developing a vaccine and when can we expect one?

Lamb: “The challenge is that there’s a whole lot of science that goes into the creation of a vaccine. We’ve got to know exactly what piece of the virus our body will raise an appropriate immune response against, and how much of that to use, because you certainly don’t want the body to go into immune overload.”

“Then there are lots of questions about safety and long-term effects with vaccine development. The clinical process is intentionally designed to be methodical. The first stage is to say, is this even safe? Does this cause major health issues?”

“And then if it is safe, the second stage is to ask: Does it actually do what we want it to do? Does it give you some level of immunity?”

“And then the third stage is to look at a whole lot of people from all different backgrounds, from all different health histories, and ask is it effective for that audience? I don’t know that we would want to give millions of people a vaccine that we’ve tested on a few hundred individuals over a span of five weeks.”

“What we’re seeing right now is probably the most rapid vaccine development we have ever had in human history. But even still, we are looking at some time in 2021 before we’ve got something that we are really confident in giving to people in the long-term. And there are probably going to be lots of vaccine trials that fail. So we’ve got to have multiple vaccines moving forward. I think right now there are about 60 or 70 potential early stage vaccines, three of which are now entering into human clinical trials. We’re going to watch those really closely, but this is not something that we can snap our fingers and get. Traditionally, it’s about four to five years to develop vaccines from scratch, so 12 to 18 months is ambitious.”

Q: Who steps up to be in human clinical trials and how does that process work?

Lamb: “It’s a huge issue, especially in those early stages when you’re looking at vaccine safety. You’re really looking for altruistic people who are willing to say, ‘Yes, I am willing to be a guinea pig for the hope of greater good down the road.’”

“And you want to make sure that if you’re going to reimburse participants for their time or if you’re going to cover some of their medical care, that you aren’t giving them such an incredible incentive that they are choosing it just because it’s financially valuable. You can’t make it so attractive that it maybe overrules their own internal decision making and you’ve got to make sure that they are understanding what it means to consent into this study.”

“These are people that I take my hat off to. These are heroes in every sense of the word who are willing to help find an answer to save somebody else’s life.”

Q: Do you think we’ll ever return to normal as we once knew it?

Lamb: “I don’t think we are ever going to go back to exactly what we saw last November and December. …Now that said, we will tip-toe back towards normalcy. We will at some point gather together in crowds. We will go to restaurants. We will hug people we love, and we will celebrate at sports events and at concerts.”

“But the path back to that is going to be slow and we’re going to have to think about things in a different way. I think we are stepping into a different world that will bear resemblance to what we’ve loved, but we would be foolish if we thought we could just go back to large crowds, especially right now, without keeping in mind we still have this virus traveling through.”

“I don’t want to sound like I’m being doom and gloom or that I’m saying we should not eventually open things up. I’m incredibly optimistic. America is still the leader in science and biomedicine, and we’ve got incredible minds working across the country and around the globe. We will science our way to solutions for this, but it won’t look exactly like it used to.”

Q: What are some of the lessons we need to learn?

Lamb: “We need to have a better preparation system. We wasted a month of watching and not really stepping to the forefront and saying, “We’ve got to have more tests. We’ve got to make sure those tests work.” We had some slippages and some mistakes with the early testing with the CDC and it took us a while to bring other tests online.”

“We don’t have the public health system in our country that we once had to be able to detect and trace and follow up on contacts. We live at a thin margin of supplies, whether we’re talking about toilet paper or protective personal equipment. And I get it, you don’t want enormous stockpiles. That’s not good for anybody’s bottom line, but we are on a razor thin margin. And when you’re talking about a global pandemic and countries and states are competing against each other for who gets testing supplies and hospital protective equipment, that is really, really problematic.”

“I think because we’ve now seen the importance of taking action quickly, I hope that we will be more open in the future to saying we’re going to put a pause on having people show up at 100,000 person sporting events if there’s something circulating in other countries.”

“But here’s the challenge: We humans have a short memory and once we get through the pain and we make good resolutions for the next time, we often forget them. We say, “We don’t have the money for that,” or “We don’t have the personnel and the time for that.” And so we lurch from crisis to crisis because we aren’t willing to invest in what we need for preparedness.”

Q: What about the balance of keeping the economy going?

Lamb: “Lockdown is clearly not the long-term solution. And in fact, lockdown would not have been the preferred first step that we took, but the virus got ahead of us in this country and in lots of other countries. And the most rapid way to slow the infection and to reduce the number of cases was to put everybody in stay at home. But our world cannot live in lockdown, so the hope is that we have other less draconian steps we can take in the future.”

“The three key phrases right now are test, trace and isolate. We need to have enough testing. Then, once we know who’s infected, we have to trace who they’ve come in contact with and put those people on alert and then do some isolation. If we can do that successfully, then society can begin to resume some semblance of normal. The goal is to be able to live alongside this virus until we have a vaccine.”

Rachel Blackmon Bryars is a Huntsville-based columnist for Al.com, co-host of Belle Curve Podcast and managing partner of Bryars Communications, LLC. Keep up with her work on her Facebook page.

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