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Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 Tower Magazine interviewed Associate Professor William Cody on April 22, 2020.
“As a microbiologist, I’m always interested in emerging diseases, and unfortunately there have been a significant number of outbreaks in recent years,” he said. “There is always a chance of an epidemic becoming a pandemic, but it’s not a typical occurrence. In late January or early February, I realized I needed to start taking more notice. The reports from Italy were when I first started getting worried.” When students in his Disease and Society class asked him about the coronavirus, he explained that annually about 1.5 million children die of vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide, but due to the success of our vaccination program, Americans see relatively few deaths and have stopped believing in the dangers of infectious diseases. “I told them that yes, this is going to get serious, but no one will care because we don’t pay attention; we see infectious disease as something that happens in other countries or to the poor,” he said. “I did not think we’d see shelter-in-place orders. I’m not shocked at the number of deaths, but I am shocked at the extent of the response, because the U.S. does not typically coordinate large-scale efforts to mitigate threats from infectious disease.”
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As far as how long we should keep up some degree of sheltering and distancing, Cody says we just don’t have the data to know. We haven’t been doing enough testing. The tests haven’t been available enough; first, we weren’t able to get the tests, and even now, people are being told they don’t qualify to get one because they are not in a highrisk category.
Cody believes that the atypical response was due to the danger to the health care system and the fear that the COVID-19 pandemic could actually collapse it. People who normally do not have to worry about access to health care suddenly felt threatened. In reality, Cody emphasized, millions of Americans have always been without access to health care, but these are the people on the margins, not usually the middle and upper classes. “And we’re still not taking the deaths seriously,” he said. “It’s still an abstract concept to many. You don’t know someone personally who’s died, so you don’t realize the severity of the threat.” What does Cody think about reopening? “I don’t know that Americans have the taste for what we’ve been doing,” he said. “Sheltering, social distancing and in general being told what to do. There is also the very real economic problem. In some cases, too, not only are people out of work, but their insurance was tied to work, so their access to health care has also been compromised.”
“We won’t have the data until we can test those who are asymptomatic,” he explained. “I’d be shocked if we made it through the summer still sheltering and distancing, though, whether because of the social isolation, the economy or not wanting to be told what to do. Still, we don’t have the data to support businesses reopening right now.” At the same time, politicizing everything is not productive, Cody feels. “Most of us are just trying to figure out how to get our families safely through this,” he said. Cody admits that he has been disappointed in our public health agencies, namely the CDC: “We have not seen much leadership from them during this pandemic.” Due to the belated governmental response to COVID-19, all of us, regardless of political affiliation, have somewhat lost confidence in the institutions we should be trusting to protect us. Further, Cody feels that it’s truly scary when politics becomes involved with infectious disease. “We have these daily press conferences, but reporters who cover politics are asking political questions,” he said. “We need live coverage of press conferences at the CDC.
photos: norbert kundrak, jeff mcwhorter.
t was late November or early December when Associate Professor and Chair of Biology William Cody, Ph.D., UD’s resident infectious disease expert, first heard about the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, but he admits that at the time, he wasn’t paying any particular attention to it.
