Episode 086: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Ends with Dr. David Graham

Now that we are over a month into the variable stay at home orders in the United States for the coronavirus it is probably a good time to reflect and guess as to how this all unfolds. Today I interviewed infectious disease specialist Dr. David Graham. Dr.Graham lives in Billings, Montana and provides a perspective on the pandemic that I had not yet heard. He suggests that at the forefront of this nationwide panic is that our media and government are not being honest with us.

Specifically, he states that the CDC, FDA, and government officials are not being frank with the goals of the stay at home and reopening process nor with how best to protect ourselves. Officials are often making decisions based on gut instinct rather than data and politicization of the stay at home orders has made a sensible step back from safety measures difficult to implement.

The question on everyone's mind right now is how and when does this end? As for when, Dr. Graham suggests it will be 4-5 years before things return to a pre-pandemic level of activity. But even then perhaps life will seem very different and foreign to us today. In the meantime there will be no large gatherings - sorry sports fans and concert goers - and mundane activities like singing in choir will be suppressed.

To answer the question of how the pandemic ends will be one of two ways. Either we do a slow burn for years preventing our health system from being overrun with exponential growth until the virus becomes like a common cold or someone develops some novel viral medication or cure that is currently unknown. Personally, he suspects that it will be the medicine to end all future pandemics but there is no way to predict how or what that is.

When it comes to humanity versus the virus Dr. Graham suggest we lay our money down on humanity overcoming this new obstacle and flourishing again.