I think the focus needs to be on vaccines, not on masks for vaccinated individuals, i don’t see that being a major way the trajectory of cases changes. If it’s a rare occurrence maybe contagious in a small number of people- how is that going to make a dent in transmission going on from unvaccinated [people]?

Amesh Adalja

I think that there likely is a lot of pressure on vaccine developers to release information as quickly as possible because of the fact that we know that the only way back to any kind of normalcy is through a vaccine, there are I think a lot of incentives to try and amplify good news when most things that we care about in the pandemic are bad news.

It's moved the needle a little bit for me -- I think that it shows that it's safe, i anxiously await Phase 2 trial data, which is much more useful to us in trying to demonstrate whether or not this vaccine will ultimately be effective.

What we do see is encouraging.

Over the last several weeks it's become easier for me to order tests for people, but the point is doctors and people have to be comfortable ordering tests and not worrying about supply chain issues.

It tells us this virus is much more widespread than we thought, the hospitalization rate may be much lower because the denominator( of people infected) is so much bigger.

It's not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing.

It's a very elegant solution, and that's why they could go to vaccine trials so quickly, because all they need is a sequence of the virus, they don't have to tinker with the virus to make a vaccine candidate. They can just make a vaccine candidate with genetic sequence of the virus.

If you're sending it to Quest or LabCorp, the test has to be sent out of the hospital, that requires paperwork.

There are many disincentives to testing, what we really need is to have test kits in the hands of doctors and hospitals, where they don't have to send it out.

In an outbreak your really have to interpret fatality rates with a very skeptical eye, because often it's only the very severe cases that are coming to people's attention, it's very hard to say those numbers represent anything like the true burden of infection.