Raina MacIntyre

I'm Raina McIntyre.

I'm Professor of Global Biosecurity at the Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales, Australia.

I study infectious diseases, particularly emerging infectious diseases, vaccine preventable diseases and issues around biosecurity, pandemic preparedness.

It is really important to get a good evidence base for a number of different parameters around COVID-19.

One is to understand the transmission because understanding transmission is what we need to help contain the disease and prevent it.

And there's still a lot of uncertainty about, for example, how much asymptomatic transmission is happening.

So I think better understanding the transmission dynamics and getting all those parameters that we're interested in, like the R0, the reproductive number, et cetera, properly estimated.

Then obviously we need data on the immune response, the immunology of the virus.

There is data around SARS and MERS coronavirus, which is helpful, but we need to understand the immunology so that we can develop the vaccines.

Then, of course, we need to understand the clinical picture and the treatment.

There's antiretroviral drugs that are used for HIV treatment, which were used in SARS, but systematic reviews did not show evidence of efficacy from SARS.

So we need to see the clinical trials.

emerge so we can actually assess the efficacy of these therapeutic options.

Because unlike SARS and MERS coronavirus, this is much more widespread.

In two months, you know, the number of cases and deaths has been exceeded from what SARS took about eight months to accrue.

So the scale of this may be much bigger.

And understanding the treatments is going to be really important.

Sure.

So we did a study where we identified children with influenza-like illness and we then randomized their families to use surgical masks, P2 respirators or no masks and follow them up for symptom development in the parents.

and did virological testing on the kids and the parents.