Dr. Scott Gottlieb said:
Heilbrunn: Can you talk about the role of diagnostics both for patient care but also for disease surveillance?
Gottlieb: You are going to want two things. One is a point of care diagnostic. You’re going to want a diagnostic that you can deploy to doctor’s offices so that you can diagnose people really easily so that when you find people who have coronavirus, you can quarantine them. We’re not going to wait twenty-four to forty-eight hours for a diagnostic, it really needs to be in the doctor’s office. And there is no reason that is not attainable. That is something you should be able to develop within three months. We have all kinds of rapid diagnostics at doctor’s offices—the flu swab, which you’re probably familiar with.
The other thing you’re going to want is an extremely robust surveillance system. You’re going to want a system that basically looks at people who present with influenza-like illness but who test negative for the flu. And you then test their samples to see what they have. We currently do that. We have a surveillance system distributed throughout multiple cities and we take a certain number of samples—it’s a small amount—it’s not tens of thousands but thousands and we test them for other things to see what is circulating in the population. We also do that to try to have an early detection in case, like, a pandemic flu stream is circulating. But we don’t do it for this novel coronavirus and we don’t do it on a mass scale.
What you’re going to want by the fall is to really blow that out, do it at a mass scale, and obviously build out the capability to do it for coronavirus. Because this coronavirus is not really going to come and go. It’s going to be with us. And unless we have those kinds of tools available to us and this kind of surveillance system in place, this is going to change daily life in perpetuity until we have a vaccine. And that’s not sustainable. The kind of posture that the nation is in right now isn’t sustainable. And another major epidemic won’t be sustainable. So we need the tools to change the landscape for how we deal with this and people need to be really focused on that right now because I think we got caught a little flat-footed with this epidemic. We were not really anticipating that this would become an epidemic in the United States. Although there were people who felt that it would, there was not the kind of preparation, necessarily, that needed to happen two months ago to prepare for now. And you don’t want to be in a situation where it’s September and saying, “Gosh, I really wish we would have done some things differently in May and June so we have different tools and a different posture.”