'Communities of color are disproportionately affected' amid COVID-19: Stanford Medicine Dean

Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine Dr. Lloyd Minor joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to discuss the latest spike in coronavirus cases and the medical school's teaching strategy amid the pandemic.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Well, as coronavirus continues to impact the United States, worldwide cases are growing faster than ever. And here at home, Florida actually had the largest number of cases in six weeks.

So to chat more about this we're joined now by Dr. Lloyd Minor, Dean at Stanford Medicine. Hi, doctor, how are you?

LLOYD MINOR: I'm well. How are you, Kristin? Good to see you.

KRISTIN MYERS: I'm good, thanks. So Doctor, I want to ask you why we are seeing this trending positive case numbers going upward. It seemed like we were had such good news with that case number coming down over the last several weeks.

LLOYD MINOR: I think there could be several reasons that we're seeing an increase in cases in some areas. You know, we're now in that period after Memorial Day when we would expect to see new cases from exposures during Memorial Day. We know that the incubation period, the time from exposure to development of symptoms for this virus, is in the neighborhood typically of 7 to 14 days. So we're in that time window now.

And the activity of people during Memorial Day in Florida and other places may account for some of that increase in cases. We still need to be vigilant. Even as many locations are releasing some of the shelter in place orders, we still need to be vigilant about observing social distancing, about wearing masks in public places when we're going to be around other people, and taking the precautions that we should always be doing, such as hand washing and other precautions.

KRISTIN MYERS: Do you think that perhaps reopening, some of these states reopening too soon might be contributing to these numbers? Could the protests start impacting those numbers in the days and weeks coming up?

LLOYD MINOR: Well, those are all concerns and things that we're going to need to watch very carefully. Now we do have a lot more testing available today than we did at the beginning of the pandemic in the United States back three months ago. We still need more testing. But we have, in most regions of the United States today, far more testing, so that people, when they do experience symptoms, they can be rapidly tested, and if they're positive, they can quarantine at home.

Hopefully, they won't need hospitalization, and their contacts can be traced. That's what it's going to take to really contain this epidemic until we get a vaccine.

KRISTIN MYERS: So Doctor, you're, as I had mentioned in the intro, you're the dean of the medical school. I'm interested to know, I'm curious to know how you guys are training essentially the new crop of doctors as we see universities across the US, but also around the world, essentially closed.

LLOYD MINOR: Yes. For our preclinical studies, that is the studies that are done in the classroom or in laboratories, we moved to online training experiences back early in March. We haven't had any in-person gathering since then. And that's worked reasonably well, because of media such as what we're using to communicate today.

For our clinical instruction, in the hospitals and the clinics, we resumed last week getting our students back into clinics and we'll be back up full speed in terms of clinical rotations by the end of this month. I think that certainly we want to make sure we continue to graduate physicians and physicians assistants and other trainees on time. And so we've had to make some adjustments in the curriculum, as I think many of our peer institutions have. But I don't think any students are going to be delayed in their graduation nor is their training in the long term going to be adversely affected.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now in California, Los Angeles was pretty hard hit by the virus. The Bay Area not as badly affected. One, why? And is there any lessons that could be learned there from your area that could be passed on to other cities or states?

LLOYD MINOR: Yes, I think there are several reasons why the Bay Area was not as severely affected. First, even before the counties in the Bay Area issued a shelter in place order, a full week before that, most of the tech firms had sent their employees home, to work from home. And then the counties did move forward with a shelter in place order around March 13 and the state followed very closely thereafter. And that limited the transmission of the virus.

Also, we were able to do testing in this area before many other places were. We here at Stanford were one of the first to get approval through emergency use authorization from the FDA for our diagnostic test for the virus, the so-called RTPCR. And during much of March, we were doing the majority of the testing here in the Bay Area. We were able to get results quickly back to patients and healthcare providers about who was infected, and then those patients could receive treatment and also quarantine and have their contacts traced.

Another benefit actually in the Bay Area, or another reason why we perhaps didn't have as large of a surge as many places, is that we have relatively poor mass transit in the Bay Area. And a lot of the exposures, I think, that tragically happened and the reason for the huge number of cases and the surge in New York could in some way be related to the mass transit systems, which ordinarily are benefit but in this particular case served as a mechanism for the spread of the virus.

KRISTIN MYERS: That is the first, I guess, good news about not having good mass transit. Last question here quickly for you, Doctor. So we we've talked a lot about racial inequity. And I know that COVID-19 exposed a lot of those. I'm wondering specifically if the university is doing anything to improve health or health access to minorities in your area.

LLOYD MINOR: Yes. We have number of partnerships and collaborations. I mentioned the testing that we continue to do and we rolled out early and made it available to healthcare delivery systems around our area.

We also have a number of partnerships and affiliations with communities that are underserved. And we have a lot of scholarship going on here related to health inequities. As you very correctly pointed out, COVID-19 has underscored the fact that underserved communities, communities of color are disproportionately affected by this disease and by so many other diseases. And it's underscored the fact that the social behavioral racial environmental determinants of health account for the bulk of healthcare outcomes and in healthcare. And that's something we all need to focus a lot more attention on in the future than we have in the past.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right. We'll have to leave that there. Dr. Lloyd Minor, Dean at Stanford Medicine, thanks so much for your time.

LLOYD MINOR: Thank you.