Santa Clara County’s Dr. Cody Predicts Grim Coronavirus Outlook

SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA — You might as well get used to sheltering in place, because other than trips to the grocery store, you’re probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

That’s according to arguably the Bay Area’s most influential public health official, who painted a grim picture of what lies ahead for all of us in a new world shaped by the new coronavirus outbreak in an ABC7 News interview on Monday night.

Santa Clara County Public Health Director Dr. Sara Cody, heralded the “Bay Area’s Dr. Anthony Fauci” in a recent San Jose Mercury News profile, was a leading voice in the decision by six Bay Area counties to issue a three-week shelter-in-place order on March 16. The orders have since been extended until at least May 3.

The state is under nearly identical stay-at-home orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom “until further notice.”

The timeline for life returning to a semblance of normalcy?

There is none.

"We're going to be at this for a very, very long time," Cody told ABC7.

"I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a marathon and we have to keep ourselves nourished somehow, and we have to keep our energy good."

The good news for Bay Area residents as that the implementation of strict social distancing orders early on in the crisis compared to the rest of the country has helped flatten the curve, meaning that hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19 patients than in other parts of the country, and those who need medical attention are more likely to receive it.

The bad news is that the virus is spreading faster than medical science’s ability to develop a vaccine or treatment that could halt the pandemic.

And Cody believes we’re all likely to develop the respiratory illness that has already snuffed out the lives of more than 87,000 people around the world as of Wednesday and 43 in Santa Clara County as of Tuesday.

"Yes, probably at some point," Cody told ABC7 anchor Liz Kreutz when asked if she believes the entire world population will eventually become infected.

"We have to remember that everyone in our community is likely susceptible. In other words, if exposed to the virus would become infected and so when you have conditions like this, we expect a surge. What our shelter in place order does, though, is slow things down, so we spread the cases out over a long period of time, and we spread the number of people who are severely ill and require hospitalization out over a longer period of time as well."

Although Cody is considered among the Bay Area’s most authoritative voices in the epidemiological circles, experts aren’t monolithic in their views on how long the COVID-19 crisis will last.

Stanford biophysicist Michael Levitt told the Los Angeles Times last month that as long as we continue to follow reasonable social distancing guidelines, we can dial down the fear factor a few notches.

"What we need is to control the panic," he told the Times, "we're going to be fine."

But Cody’s prediction shouldn’t be easily dismissed.

The Stanford graduate was the first to warn that the new coronavirus outbreak would turn life as we knew it upside down in late January.

Her assessment of the COVID-19 crisis is consistent with the outlook of Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, who told The Atlantic in February that between 40 to 70 percent of the world’s population would be infected within a year.

“I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable,” Lipsitch said.

Cody warns that abandoning social distancing measures that have been proven to slow down the spread of the illness could trigger disastrous consequences, noting that in countries that have tried to relax such measures “cases tend to re-surge.”

“And that's not surprising, right? Because we still don't have widespread immunity in the population, and so we have to think of all the different ways in which we can limit spread and keep the rate of growth as slow as possible.”

For the foreseeable future, we’re just going to have to get used to our “new normal,” she told ABC7.

“Life right now is very, very different than the end of 2019,” Cody said. “And part of our new normal and new life is living with a lot of uncertainty. We just don't have certainty about what things are going to look like you, know, a month down the line, or three months down the line, or six months down the line. There's uncertainty, we don't know.”

Watch the interview and read more at ABC7 News.

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