Traditional Thanksgiving plans will make the spread of the virus much worse: Emergency Medicine Physician

Dr. Seth Trueger, Emergency Medicine Physician joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the latest COVID-19 numbers, vaccine news and what needs to happen to lower the spread of the virus.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Welcome in to Yahoo Finance Live here as we hit 12 noon in today's trading session. I'm Zack Guzman alongside Akiko Fujita. And looking at the major indices right now, the NASDAQ remains the lone wolf in the red as you look at the Dow enjoying about 140 point boost right now, the S&P just above break even. As we've been discussing here on the show, today, a Black Friday like no other. The nation's largest retailers are opting for online doorbusters to get everybody in store or perhaps shopping online and picking it up curbside, as well, as adding some attention here in terms of keeping customers safe in store to reduce COVID, and prevent the spread of those rising cases. We're going to be chatting here in just a second.

But optimism on the vaccine front, once again, coming on this Monday. We've seen that before. This time around, it's Oxford and AstraZeneca's vaccine showing an average of about 70% effectiveness, potentially all the way up to 90% if some changes are made. Still waiting on the full data in that read out. The announcement coming after a string of positive news, again, following the Pfizer vaccine and Moderna vaccine readouts, as well.

I want to start the second half of our show today with the focus on that vaccine front with Dr. Seth Trueger. He's an emergency medicine physician based out of Chicago. And Dr. Trueger, it's good to have you back on with us here. I mean, we're discussing the 70% effectiveness, AstraZeneca and Oxford saying that it could be as high as 90% effective if half the dose given and then treated with a second dose here. That seems to be the trend. But where does this new readout kind of fit in with what we've already heard from scientists trying to get these vaccines out the door?

SETH TRUEGER: Right. Well, this is you know cautiously good news. We don't have public data yet. We just have press releases from the companies, just like we had with Moderna, as well as Pfizer. So it's better to have good news that no news or bad news, but it's still not the great answer. Obviously, we'd love to have the EUAs or the approval, as well, but that's going to rely on good data and good public data. And what's important is that there's public trust about what's going on.

Overall, honestly, I think it's really great to have a couple of different options for the vaccines. One is the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines, are these new platforms. They're mRNA-based. They're working in different way. We've already seen, you know, decades of vaccine hesitancy across the board, as well as specific concerns about new vaccines that have been pushed through pretty quickly, you know, at historical paces. So the fact that this new vaccine, this AstraZeneca one, is a typical adenovirus vaccine like a lot of vaccines that have worked for decades, there's no reason to specifically be concerned about the mRNA vaccines. But anything that, you know, makes it more like this is less new, more like these are vaccines we're used to working with, I think is going to make it a little bit easier for people to be happy taking the vaccines.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. And you're right to point out some of those concerns there. We've seen some concerns from analysts talking about the data specifically, this time, that we got from AstraZeneca, noting that it wasn't fully disclosing, giving as much information as we got from Pfizer-Moderna. Specifically, questions around maybe the dosing techniques trying to get from 70% to 90, depending on how this vaccine is going to be rolled out.

On the flip side, it does seem like the price of the shot is going to be marginally cheaper here. And not just marginally cheaper-- $3 to $4 is much cheaper than what we saw from Pfizer at about $20. So talk to me about where this fits in, I guess, when we talk about rolling this out to other countries. Not just here in the US, but others that might not be able to afford some of those higher price points.

SETH TRUEGER: Yeah, well, as a lot of the experts will talk about this, it's not just about vaccines. It about the vaccination program. It's about making the vaccine, it's about distributing it, it's about having supplies, it's about getting-- you know, getting people to actually take it. So different-- having different options is good, especially as the Pfizer one does require special care and storage. It to something like negative 80 degrees storage.

I was just talking to a colleague who does some bench research, and they were being told there they're probably going to expect to have a shortage in dry ice. They're not going to be able to do some of the bench work, because so much dry ice is expected to be used for vaccine storage. These operational challenges are big things giving vaccines out to people.

You know, I'm lucky. I'm an ER doc, I'm going to be, you know, hopefully, one of the first waves of people eligible for vaccination. It's going to be months before we have national and international spread at major rates just as far as getting this stuff unrolled and delivered to people.

AKIKO FUJITA: In the meantime, Dr. Trueger, you're looking at average daily infections topping 171,000. That's 54% increase from just two weeks ago. We have really been increasing at a rapid rate. What are you seeing on the ground there in Chicago? And what's your biggest concern as you look across the country, you look at airports over the weekend that were family packed, despite all the warnings from doctors that say, don't travel and don't gather with your family during this Thanksgiving holiday?

SETH TRUEGER: Yeah, there's a couple of things right now that that made the current situation, the trajectory we're on, seem really scary to me. We're not in as bad shape as we were in the spring yet, but we're in a pretty bad shape. There are a lot of cases, there are a lot of hospitalizations. Deaths are sure to climb up. Unfortunately, it's also wide spread right now. It's not just in a handful of cities at a time like it was in the spring. So there's not going to be as much capacity for physicians and nurses to travel and help out of their areas. There's going to be a big shift in capacity nationwide, especially in the Midwest and upper Midwest.

And this is all happening in a trajectory where Illinois has been projected to run out of ICU beds by Thanksgiving. That's before people travel a bunch, before people start spreading, infecting family members. And honestly, this is one of the things that's really tough. I'm not worried about any individual person getting sick or getting their friends or family sick when they visit them in Thanksgiving. What I'm worried about is all the spread that's going to happen to everybody-- you know, if you have a Thanksgiving meal with 20 people, and most of those people do fine, but one of them infects five other people, and one of those people infects five other people, we're going to see that big exponential spread.

And we're starting behind the eight ball already. We are in bad shape. It's going to get worse. And if people do traditional Thanksgiving plans, It's going to get much, much worse. And we're going to have a really dark winter.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I think that's why-- I mean, as much as the coverage has been focused on vaccines here, it's still also important to focus on some of these other drug therapies that doctors like you are going to be using here on the front lines. And on that front, Regeneron 1, emergency use authorization from the FDA for their antibody cocktail that was given to President Trump earlier this year. There's that. Also, Merck, as Ines Ferre was highlighting for us a little bit ago, acquiring a biotech company that's also producing a drug that shows that it reduces the risk in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 requiring oxygen-- a drop of more than 50% for them.

But Regeneron's drug, as it was used in the president, is meant for people to prevent them even going to the hospital in the first place, which would obviously help on the capacity front. So talk to me about how big that drug is and how big those efforts are to help.

SETH TRUEGER: I mean, it is promising. It would be better to have effective drugs, especially in low acuity patients who don't need hospitalization so they don't get hospitalized, so they don't spread it to more people. But these are still a really small chip in the process. Ultimately, the bottom line is what we need are fewer cases. You know, we've been doing a great job and learning what we do, learning that early in the patient was probably not helpful, learning about steroids. You know, we have-- Remdesivir is fairly widespread now.

But at the rates we're seeing, even if we magically add all these drugs all over the place, we're going to have far too many cases for the drugs to be the big thing that makes a difference. You know, unfortunately, this is the kind of thing where it's not about, you know, quarterbacks making big Hail Marys. This is about blocking and tackling. This about the simple things like masks, not gathering, not doing things like Thanksgiving to keep cases down so that we can take care of people better. Not, you know, the fancy drugs that look great.

AKIKO FUJITA: And Dr. Trueger, going back to what you said earlier about the outlook, at least in the state of Illinois, where you are, the expectation here that you're going to have all the hospital beds at max capacity, completely filled by the end of this month, what's the plan right now going into December, given the lag that we usually see in the uptick, after travel, after these infections, you're going into December already in a tough positio? What's the plan if the hospitals reach capacity?

SETH TRUEGER: Yeah, I mean, it's tough. We're probably going to get into situations like we had in the spring, where we do things like make field tents and field hospitals, put patients in hotels so they can stay you stay at home away from family and not infect more people. But the bottom line is hospitals are already starting to make big announcement about things like cutting elective surgery. Doing things like cutting capacity. Hospitals don't want to do that. That's where money comes from. That's where hospitals get most of their revenue.

And also remember that we use the word elective surgery-- it doesn't mean what it sounds like in the colloquial sense. Most elective surgeries are things like the important heart procedures, important cancer dissections. The things that are important lifesaving or life-altering, but you don't need to happen at 3:00 in the morning. These are things that are really important that are going to affect people.

And right now, we're basically doing what we did in the spring, where we're taking all the slack out of the system, and where we basically turned our whole hospital essentially into a COVID hospital. We quadrupled our ICU space and it was almost all COVID patients. That means not only do our hospitals going to be full of a lot of patients who have COVID, but they're going to be unable to give care to people who have other problems.

This is going to be a big problem. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to overcome it, because the bottom line is there's only so much hospital space, only so much staff, and only so much equipment, and only so much we can take care of people. So the most important thing-- again, it's boring-- but the most important thing is stay at home, don't infect other people, do your best to keep the case rate down. That's how we're eating through this.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, important reminders there from Dr. Trueger. I know you're very busy battling all this on the front lines. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.

SETH TRUEGER: OK, thanks for having me.