COVID-19

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Good afternoon. This is Dr. Joseph Crawford again with Advanced Urology Associates talking about our COVID pandemic. This is number two in our series of public service announcements. And I encourage you to listen to our previous service announcement about the overview of the pandemic. Today, we're going to talk about something that I think is vitally important in order to get us to safely reengage. That is, why do we do antibody testing, and why do I think it's so important for the general population? As you know, there's been a resurgence of COVID infection in Florida up to 8000 cases a day we've had people that have been tested previously that were negative and because of increasing social interaction, now have been exposed to someone who was positive and now have to worry about whether it's going to be safe for them and their families to go to work socially re engage. So why do we do antibody testing? Well, antibody testing gives us a view of previous infections. If you've been exposed, has your social distancing, your PPE's been effective, or have you been exposed either because you've become ill, or because you are a carrier of the virus and are asymptomatic. Secondly, it gives us a very good idea in terms of our high risk population, where the individuals are in confined spaces, nursing homes, ACLFs, even in our presence, those individuals are at higher risk. Thirdly, those individuals that work in those environments certainly have a higher risk and we need to know are they safe, have they been exposed? Next, we really need to know about: are you protected? We can't tell about individual protection with antibodies. But certainly, if you develop antibodies, we need to know it because that may provide an indication of future protection against the second wave. We know that people who've had the disease, up to 4% of those individuals have had COVID infection, will get it again. We also need to know about immunity in terms of vaccines. Are we going to have a vaccine? Will these antibodies that we develop, are they going to be beneficial? Are they going to be neutralizing antibodies that can neutralize the infection? We also need to know about contact tracing. Antibodies let us know where people have been exposed, who we need to contact to make sure that the people they've been in contact are safe, and gives us a roadmap of where the disease is in our community. We've all heard the word herd immunity. We need to know how much or what percentage of our population in our community has been exposed. We know that several weeks ago, it was a three or 4%. Before herd immunity takes effect in our area it has to be 50-55% so we really need a snapshot of where we are with the pandemic. Is it going to be safe for us to reengage in the community? Is it going to be safe for our children to go back to school? If we don't look at our administrators, our staff and our teachers, we're not going to be able to say those schools are safe. The American Pediatric Association that says it's vitally important that in the Fall, that we have students in school in the facilities. Well, we need to make sure that not only the teachers, staff and administrators are safe, but we need to make sure that the students are safe. I think antibody testing fits these rules very critically. Finally, antibody testing will also give us an idea of those individuals that have been exposed to the disease and may develop significant antibody titers or amounts of antibody present, that they can donate their plasma and be plasma donors. This can be life saving for those individuals with COVID-19 that are hospitalized with significant respiratory difficulties or are on ventilators. So I think it's obvious that we need to have a strategy to test for antibodies in the high risk patients down to the general population that want to reengage in both work as well as school. I hope this has provided an insight in terms of why antibody testing is so important and why. At Advanced Urology, we're actively engaged in testing our first responders, those who work in nursing homes and ACLFs healthcare workers, as well as our elderly. I look forward to talking to you next week, on another subject with COVID-19

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Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Joseph Crawford with Advanced Urology and today we're going to continue our series on the COVID pandemic. Where are we? Where are we going to go? What I like to call the crystal ball view of the COVID pandemic in Florida. If you listen to different radio stations, TV stations, or even look at the news, where the governor of Georgia is suing the mayor of Atlanta, over wearing masks, you know that there is a variety of different opinions about how should we emerge? How can we restart our educational and our economic systems? We need a path forward. Well, as you've heard in the past, I strongly believe in antibody testing, not that it tells us about an individual and their COVID safety, but rather, it gives us an idea about the COVID exposure, about the safety of groups of people. Whether they are naive or unexposed to the COVID virus, and if it's safe for them as a group to get together and restart our educational system, that means testing our administrators, our staff and our teachers. And if they're negative, we know they haven't been exposed to the COVID virus. If they're positive, certainly we can test them for the virus on two separate tests. If they're negative on both subsequent tests, we know they were exposed to the COVID virus, but they don't have the virus itself. They're over that and they probably have antibodies. If we test our staff, our teachers, as well as our administrators, we know that the environment is safe. If we test our students using a sputum test for antigen or virus, we know that they are safe. Well if the students are safe and we know their environment and the teachers, staff and administrators are safe, we know we can restart our educational system with a minimum of risk. And that's what this is all about. Looking at risk, no tests, no pathway is going to be perfect. But if we can make it as safe for our educational system, as well as our economic system to restart, then we've got a chance to raise ourselves out of this catastrophe that has been the COVID infection. If by example, we use the educational system and it works, then why not extend that to the gyms, the bars, the restaurants, or even the football stadiums to look at where we stand and making sure that those individuals who that attend those events or participate in those activities are safe. I think this is our best way to reemerge from this COVID virus and the pandemic. Other countries around the United States are doing so and I think we need to take the steps to reinvigorate our educational and our economic system so we can get back to normal way of life. I want to thank you for listening and I look forward to speaking to you next week with regards to other issues on the COVID pandemic.