Adva Gadoth. Photo courtesy of NuRoots. UCLA infectious disease epidemiologist Adva Gadoth answered questions about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in a March 19 Zoom call, hosted by NuRoots, an initiative of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.
Gadoth said she has been working with researchers at UCLA to track coronavirus patients and different exposures to the virus. When asked about social distancing from a spouse, roommate or anyone else in the home, she said the best thing is to lay down ground rules.
“Any time anyone leaves the house and has a potential risky exposure, they bring that risk back with them,” Gadoth said. She added, “You can space yourself out a little more than usual.”
Some of the precautions that people can take at home include cleaning high-touch surfaces in common-room areas like the kitchen or bathroom, as well as doorknobs and windowsills, Gadoth said. She also urged co-habitants not to share food with each other.
Other recommended measures include keeping the home “well-ventilated and [using] separate bathrooms if possible.”
When it comes to handling packages from Amazon or food deliveries, Gadoth recommended that people wash their hands immediately after handling packaging. “The key here, she said, “is to wash your hands after every touched surface that did not originate in your house.
The only mask that can work to protect you from a viral particle carried through an airborne droplet — from a cough or a sneeze — Gadoth said, is a mask like the N95 mask that has a small enough filter to block the particles. However, given that there is a shortage of such masks, “we have to preserve them for our nurses and doctors,” she said.
As long as people stay six feet part from one another — which, she said, is how far droplets from coughing and sneezing can travel — Gadoth said there’s no need to wear a mask. She also said that people can use a turtleneck or a scarf instead of a mask, especially if they’re in a grocery store.
She went over the key symptoms for coronavirus, including fever, cough and shortness breath. Young, healthy people typically can fight off the illness in two to three weeks at home, but shortness of breath would require hospitalization she said.
When it comes to social distancing, Gadoth said, those measures became necessary because the federal government declined test kits from the World Health Organization, and because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wanted to develop its own tests instead.
“We are sort of ad hoc piecing together private companies stepping up to the plate and testing on the fly.” — Adva Gadoth
“We are sort of ad hoc piecing together private companies stepping up to the plate and testing on the fly,” Gadoth said. She added that the federal government’s actions wasted precious time to contain the illness and there’s now a high likelihood that everyone can get it since it’s a new virus.
She said that it’s now just a matter of slowing the spread of the disease so hospital resources aren’t overwhelmed, and being able to buy time to develop treatments for the virus.
“I think people should expect that maybe this most severe version [of social distancing] we’re doing right now … will probably last about six weeks minimum,” she said. “I know that’s kind of alarming.”
She also stated that coronavirus cases would likely come in waves over time. “There will be a little roller coaster where we’ll have one big wave of cases and deaths and, over time, the hills will get smaller and smaller.”
She also predicted that the coronavirus will become a seasonal illness like the flu, but the virus “will be milder because it will be a mutated version of this virus and our bodies will all have been exposed to it.”
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