Houston and coronavirus: Contagion expert on what you...

Peter Hotez, based in Houston, is one of the world’s leading experts on contagious disease. An M.D. and Ph.D., he’s a professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

We asked him how Houstonians should think about coronavirus. What precautions should we take? When is it time to start taking them? What should we watch?

Please note that this lightly edited interview took place before a Fort Bend man was found to have the disease.

How much should Houstonians be changing their lives now to prevent coronavirus?

For now, Houstonians should go about their daily activities. Right now there’s no evidence that it’s here.

The big question is, when will it start here? Right now we see pockets in the U.S. I don’t think we’re going to wake up tomorrow and find that the whole eastern half of the U.S. is infected. What will happen is that there will be more and more pockets of infection, and over time those pockets will coalesce.

So for now, people should be mindful of the news.

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It’s some reassurance that the Harris Health System and Houston Health Department are very good. Other counties don’t have nearly our capacity to deal with this.

The situation is fluid. Everything recommended today may look out of touch in five to 10 days.

For now, my wife Ann and I are still going out for sake and sushi. I still plan to fly to Washington, D.C., this week to testify before Congress. But do I fly to Seattle the next week to be given grand rounds? I’m not sure.

I don’t recommend hoarding food. Prepare as you would for a hurricane. I think Ann got a couple of extra tikka masalas at Trader Joe’s to put in our freezer.

As we follow the news, what should we watch for?

My two big concerns, based on what we saw in Wuhan and in Washington state, are skilled nursing facilities and healthcare workers.

Skilled nursing facilities with older people are at high risk. It looks like the virus is picking off people in nursing homes — “mowing down people” is the phrase I think I used on Twitter.

My own mother is in a nursing facility in Boston. I’m trying not to sound alarmist, but this is a huge concern. They can’t continue to do business as usual.

The other priority has to be healthcare professionals, who are incredibly vulnerable as they’re coming into contact with people with symptoms. We’ve seen two health-care professionals infected in California.

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In Wuhan, more than 10,000 were infected. Of those, 15 percent became severely ill, requiring a ventilator.

If healthcare professionals are out of work because they’re sick, or if they’re being taken care of by other healthcare professionals in ICUs, that’s a disaster.

We have to figure out a way to make that not happen.

We have to do better, too, with the tests. We have to improve their sensitivity and specificity. We’re getting too many false negatives and false positives.

To be fair, it’s the hardest thing to do — creating reagents, testing kits and vaccines for a new virus that’s spreading rapidly is very hard.

In some ways this virus is tougher than Ebola. Unless you were taking care of someone dying of Ebola or who’d died of it, you pretty much weren’t going to get Ebola.

I got a call from a reporter at the Austin-American Statesman. He asked, Should we cancel South by Southwest? It’s hard to say.

lisa.gray@chron.com