Fmr. White House physician on coronavirus: "Social distancing does not work overnight"

Former White House Medical Unit Physician for Obama, Biden and Pence Dr. Jennifer Pena joins Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith to discuss the spread of the coronavirus and the how hospitals are coping with the outbreak.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Well, I want to talk about what we are seeing on the front lines as doctors and health-care workers really work to fight what we have seen, the outbreak here in the United States from the coronavirus.

So as it stands right now, like I said earlier, more than 160,000 cases have been confirmed right here in the US, and that staggering number comes as the country has yet to really fully ramp up the testing, meaning that there are many cases that are still going undetected at this point.

So here to talk more about this, I want to bring in Dr. Jennifer Pena, former White House Medical Unit Physician for President Obama as well as vice presidents Joe Biden and Mike Pence. And Dr. Pena, thanks so much again for taking the time to talk with us today.

I want to start with testing and what we've seen on that front. From your perspective, has there been enough progress made in terms of testing at this point?

JENNIFER PENA: Thank you for having me. So we're certainly improving. There is definitely a push to make testing more available as well as changing paradigm of the testing that we were doing. As you might have read or seen, there is FDA approval for a quick test that has been now starting-- well, will be starting to deploy here soon. And hopefully with that it will give us more data, more numbers to be able to identify those areas across the country that are starting to have an escalation of cases. That's important because that also helps us identify which areas we need to be more aggressive with social-distancing parameters in an effort to try to prevent continued spread.

SEANA SMITH: And Dr. Pena, the White House has talked about some of the models that they're using in order to make some of these policy decisions that we have heard them make really over the last several weeks. Do you have any idea, just from your time spent in the White House or from your contacts there, just in terms of what data they are looking at when they implement the-- when I guess we heard President Trump extend the stay-at-home policy through the end of April?

JENNIFER PENA: Sure. So there's a variety of different models out there, not just from epidemiologists here in the United States but also modeling that's coming from overseas in countries where the pandemic is starting to slow down as well as in countries where they're still hitting those peaks. And so it's really a conglomerate of information that's coming into the White House.

I think Dr. Anthony Fauci said it best. At this point, it's hard to necessarily specifically predict where we're going-- when we're going to hit that peak, but we should expect that we might still see a lot more cases and certainly a lot more deaths. And so I think the key to that and all of that modeling is preparing our health-care systems to be able to handle the influx and the surge of many more patients. We're still very early in the pandemic on any of the models.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, Dr. Pena, when you-- when we talk about preparing our health-care system for the influx and the number of cases that we could see, there's already been reports that hospitals are running out of room, or it's almost been confirmed, really. If you take a look at what's happening in New York City, we have tents going up in Central Park. We had the ship park in the New York harbor yesterday.

There was a story in the "Wall Street Journal" today that caught our attention. It was talking about NYU Langone is telling their emergency-room doctors that they need to, quote, "think more critically about who gets ventilators." So they're basically choosing who will get a ventilator and who won't get a ventilator. Just from your perspective as a doctor, how do you prepare yourself to be faced with those types of questions or those types of decisions, I guess I should say?

JENNIFER PENA: Right, and it's a terrible situation. As health-care providers in this country, nobody ever expects that we're going to have to make those types of decisions. The term ventilator triage has been commented about recently, and it's just something-- it's an ethical dilemma that no medical provider ever wants to deal with.

You know, there is guidance out there in different hospitals and hospital systems that recommends committees that can help with this triage to take the burden off of the bedside clinician so that they can focus on the care at hand. Sometimes they get a bad rap in terms of being, quote, unquote, "death panels" or panels of people that are determining who would best benefit from ventilator usage or the usage of very limited resources in the hospital, but the reality is by improving this triage-- and I hope that we don't have to get to that, but if we get to this point where we have to start triaging to that degree, these committees really would help determine who would benefit the most in terms of improving the chances of survival for people.

SEANA SMITH: And Dr. Pena, we were just talking to the mayor of Seattle right before you here, and what we've seen in the city of Seattle and some of the data that we've gotten out of New York shows that some of the containment efforts might be working. Just in terms of from your perspective, how encouraging is that to you in regards to what we could see in other parts of the country?

JENNIFER PENA: It is very encouraging, and I want to take a second to commend Major Durkan for those aggressive measures because it is cities like Seattle as well as some of the effects that we're seeing in places like San Francisco and the Bay Area, places like Santa Clara that took very aggressive measures early on in terms of social distancing, stay-at-home orders. We're not necessarily seeing the curve completely flattened, but we're definitely seeing a slowed-- a slowness, a slow progression of the disease, and that's what we're looking for.

And so it does take time, right? Social distancing does not work overnight. We have to allow time to reduce the spread and the transmission of the disease. Remember, when we start social distancing, there are people who might have already contracted the disease and will develop symptoms within 14 days of starting that social distancing if they've just contracted the condition. But the key is, as she mentioned, continuing the social-distancing regulations until we really start to see that curve flatten in other places across the country.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Dr. Pena, thanks so much for joining us today.

JENNIFER PENA: Thank you.