'We still have a long way to go' on the COVID-19 vaccine: Doctor

Dr. Sejal Hathi, Physician & Clinical Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital & Host of “Civic Rx” Podcast, joins Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers to break down the latest coronavirus developments, as the U.S. death toll continues to rise.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: I want to turn now to Dr. Sejal Hathi. She's a physician and clinical fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and host of the podcast CivicRX. Doctor, thanks so much for joining us. It's always great to have you here with us, although I wish we were speaking about a better topic, but we're hearing that hospitalizations are on the rise. I'm wondering if you can paint, really, the picture for us for what you, your friends, their colleagues are seeing on the ground in Boston and at other hospitals around the country.

SEJAL HATHI: Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me here. What you're learning about, reading about on the news is absolutely what's transpiring within the hospital walls all across the country, and the reality is, you know, it's difficult when we are cloistered within our homes to truly envision the horrendous tragedy that has struck. Every hospital, every state across the country, but health care workers are suffering.

We're seeing more and more individuals with COVID-19 hospitalized. Our ICUs are filling up. Meanwhile, there are still thousands of Americans who refuse to acknowledge the reality of this virus, let alone abide by the behavioral precautions prescribed by public health officials, and we're tired. We're frustrated, we are depressed, rates of mental health issues among my colleagues are skyrocketing.

It's really a grim time for all of us, and yet, we know that each of US still has the power to rewrite this history. The University of Washington published a study just a few weeks ago stating that, if 95% of the American public, and hopefully we'll see this when Joe Biden enters office on January 20th based on his press conference yesterday. If 95% of the American public were to simply don masks, we would save 130,000 lives over the course of the next few months. That is tremendous. So we know what works. We just need to make sure that we practice those precautions.

KRISTIN MYERS: I'm wondering if you think that we're going to be seeing a scenario, where hospitals have to turn patients away-- if they're not already, and based on how we're doing right now, which is not well, if you think that that scenario is coming soon.

SEJAL HATHI: Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting, Dr. Ashish Jha, who's Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health tweeted just a couple of days ago that he's worried that fewer and fewer people who would have been admitted just a couple of months ago are now being admitted [AUDIO OUT] are simply erecting stricter criteria for who can come within their walls and get the treatments and the care that they need, and, you know, we see in California as well, Governor Gavin Newsom just announced that the strictest stay at home orders since the start of this pandemic, stating that ICUs are threatening across the state to reach 85% capacity. If they do that [AUDIO OUT] businesses will close. I mean, look at [AUDIO OUT] case study of the damage that can be done when the government doesn't act quick enough.

Hospitals there are filling up. They've reached a 50% positivity rate across the state, because they simply can't cope with a number of people who are coming in. So I am-- to answer your question, I am worried that, unless we do what's right, and right now, there's no indication that we will based on the history of this pandemic. Hospitals will fill up. There won't be enough ICU beds for those who need it, and more lives will be lost.

KRISTIN MYERS: I want to ask you, doctor, how quickly do you think a vaccine will be able to stop this pandemic in its tracks? We already hear that a vaccine is being rolled out in the UK. Pfizer and Moderna say that, once they get their authorizations here in the United States, of course, they can start rolling it out as early as this month, so before the new year. Are you anticipating that this time next year the pandemic will be a fading terrible moment in all of our collective history?

SEJAL HATHI: Well I do hope and do believe. I am hopeful that, by this time next year, we will all be in a much more sane place, but life is not returning to normal, I think, for several years, and there are still multiple questions that remain about the vaccine. So to answer your question first directly, we know based on the independent panel that reported to the CDC earlier this week that, in December, should things go well on December 10th when they're reviewing the applications for the vaccine, in December, health care workers, nursing home residents are likely to get the first dose of the vaccine.

Of course, three to four weeks must transpire before they can get their second dose, or they're unlikely to achieve immunity before January, but at least we can distribute the vaccine to 20 million people over the course perhaps in the United States over the next couple of months. In February and March is when we'll start to see the next priority groups of people over the age of 65, especially those over the age of 75. Those with chronic diseases that would put them at especially high risk if they are infected, as well as essential workers.

So grocery store workers, those in education, those in food distribution, they will get the vaccine around that time. But again, it's going to take a couple months for them to achieve immunity, and then finally, in April, May and June is when the rest of us, the broader public, is likely to gain access to the vaccines. But we still don't know, for instance, whether-- how long the immunity granted by the vaccine will last.

We don't know if it's a few months, a year, longer than that, we don't know whether the vaccine can entirely stop transmission or merely prevent the most severe manifestations of COVID-19. We don't know if there are rare side effects, or particularly deleterious side effects of the vaccine that simply in these few months that we've been testing it, which is just a fraction of the time we test typical vaccines, we don't know if those will emerge in the coming months hazarding the safety of taking it. And we don't know, too, whether Americans are going to trust the vaccine, trust the efficacy, trust its safety enough to get it in record numbers.

I personally am not going to feel safe returning to my sense of normalcy until 70% of the American population is vaccinated and until some of these questions are further resolved. So I think the news of these last couple of weeks is very promising, but we still have a long way to go, and that's why it's critical that people practice these social interventions. Physical distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, minimizing nonessential travel over these coming weeks and months.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, a long way away, indeed. Dr. Sejal Hathi. Physician and clinical fellow at Mass Gen, and host of the podcast CivicRX, always great to have you here with us to bring us, you know, really some of those updates and some of those really realities. Thanks so much for joining us.