Coronavirus In North Alabama: Dr. Ali Hassoun

Dan Shaffer and Najahe Sherman talk to Dr. Ali Hassoun about ongoing concerns with the coronavirus.

Shoals.

Live in tuscumbia, breken terry, waay 31.

>> thank you.

Every night we're taking you deep into the coronavirus.

>> we're joyce by an infection disease specialist, dr. ali hassoun.

Thank you for joining us.

>> thank you.

>> dr. hassoun how concerned are you about hot spots and those clusters of out breaks here in north alabama?

>> i can tell you it's not surprising and it's what we have predicted from the beginning.

There's a chance we are going to see these clusters because we know the coronavirus did not go away completely.

As we start reopening, there's a higher chance of exposure, which means higher chance of transmission, which means increasing the number of cases.

So it is not surprising but it's worrisome because the more cases you're going to see the more chances of sicker ones, the more chances of death unfortunately.

>> ceo and huntsville hospital david spiller said at a news conference recently a spike in positive test results at the flu and fever clinic could be a result of this partial reopening, and it wasn't unexpected you say.

And did we open too soon in your opinion?

>> you know, we always said all along the way is that i think it was reopened sooner than it was supposed to be, but we need now -- it's a reality.

We need to get the people and the community to work with us.

Being on guard in the way of keeping physical distancing, the hand hygiene, pay attention to exposure, avoid gathering, big ones, all of this is going to help us out.

It really is concerning, and we have been seeing some of that.

And i can at the time you in the next few weeks it will be clearer how this is going to go as well.

>> what is it in development at huntsville hospital?

Are you in trials with any other agencies or universities?

>> so, we actually had now availability of different medications, we have tried different forms like hydroxy chloroquine with other medication, and we have addition, you know, with the news of remdisiver, and we had our first limited number of shipments of remdisiver, and hove hopefully we're going to have some availability, but again, i think that the most important part of the moment is a prevention, because all of these treatments haven't proven 100% it's going to be effective.

Prevention is known to be effective.

>> we're going to talk more about remdisiver in a second but i want to get back to the hydroxy chloroquine.

They're studying this for treatment of coronavirus.

You said huntsville hospital has used those drugs and what were the results.

>> so, you know, we have used it in several of our patients and we have seen improvement.

But i can tell you sometimes it's hard to judge these if there are small numbers.

That's why we really need trials, to compare those who don't take it to make a better judgment if these are effective treatment or not.

What we have currently in the literature about these combination has been very mixed results.

It's hard to tell.

But in our experience at the moment, we think some of these patients did get better.

>> new supplies of the drug remdisiver were recently distributed around the country.

Huntsville hospital received some.

How does the hospital determine which patients will receive it?

And how much of the drug does the hospital have?

>> so, you know, the distribution is coming from the alabama department of public health.

And they're the ones who are going to decide which hospital gets how many doses.

For us in huntsville hospital, we actually already have discussed -- especially we got our first shipment yesterday.

We have discussed about the protocol of which patient will be more suitable.

Especially the alabama department of public health gives certain criteria, and we added to that other criteria to see if we can use it to the most needed basically because it's limited about of these doses so we really need to use in those who most need it.

>> what happens when it's all gone?

>> that's one of the concerns.

But i can tell you we have had some success in some other ones that we have used all of these makes, including remdisiver, hasn't been proven 100% effective, so we're trying our best to use what is more suitable, what is most appropriate, in each one of these patients because each one of these patients can have different needs for different medication, and different management options sometimes.

>> in terms of a vaccine how will the vaccine work?

>> the vaccine is basically -- you exposed the patient to what we call a kill virus, or part of the virus.

And by that, you hope our immunity will rebound in a way to make fighting possibility toward the virus.

Shoving -- so you give the vaccine and make up that in a way and if we get exposed at any point we might be able to fight it off.

>> when do you think a vaccine would be available to the public?

I have heard that we have never actually created a vaccine to fight against a coronavirus in the past.

>> and that's true.

So there haven't been any vaccines made before all of the covid issue comes up.

But since the covid issue came up, there is hundreds of different trials, trying to look at different types of vac seeps, whether in the united states or overseas.

This is going to take time.

Because you want to make sure when you give anything, medication or vaccine, it's going to be safe.

So safety is first and then is isit efficacious?

It's going to take several months to study and know.

So it's probably the soonest is going to be sometime in the fall, but that's really, really optimistic way of feeling about it.

It's probably going to be much longer than that.

>> and dr. hassoun what if the vaccine doesn't work?

>> yeah, so, this is an excellent question.

Because you know, in our population who get flu vaccine that we encourage every year it's not hundred percent effective, even if it's 50 percent effective, it's good in a way because some of the other ones who get the vaccine, even though it's not effective, but it might give some immunity, and by doing so, it might help fight it in a way because you can get some sort of, like, immunity, the whole community, so you can reduce the severity of infection, like when we have the flu, hopefully.

So it does help, even if it's not 100% effective.