I am concerned about what I see in society, what I am calling pandemic fatigue and its effect on the behavior of the average bored, anxious and moderately depressed citizens. Adriana Belmonte reported that the U.S. has the highest number of coronavirus cases around the world, but the rate of infections has declined in several parts of the country as a result of social distancing restrictions.

Dr. Lakshmana Swamy, an ICU physician at Boston Medical Center, warned what could happen if people take too much of a lackadaisical approach towards the pandemic.

“What are people seeing across the country in our numbers?” Swamy said on Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker recently. “They’re seeing coronavirus cases go down. That’s fantastic.” 

But, he added, “what you’re not seeing is that the hospital is still jam-packed with people that were deferring care, who were staying at home, scared of coming in. So, the hospital is still really busy. No one’s getting a break here. It’s terrifying to think that now on top of this, as we start to reopen, we could lose control of the virus again.”

‘What I’m seeing in Alabama … terrifies me’

There are currently 20 states experiencing an increase in the number of coronavirus cases. Most of these states — including Alabama, Florida, and Georgia — were among the first ones to reopen their economies over the last month. 

“What I’m seeing in Alabama, of course, terrifies me, as it does so many people,” Swamy said. “We’re all suffering from lockdown. It’s a huge hit, of course, to the economy, to individual people, to health, to everything. But it pales in comparison to the cost that the virus takes when it runs free.” 

Although many are calling for an end to social distancing restrictions because of its impact on the economy, research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has indicated that reopening the economy “will have a much smaller-than-expected impact.”

“You look across the country where people haven’t been hit as hard, thank god,” Swamy said. “But you see that people don’t get it. It’s a really abstract concept. It’s hard to believe in that, right? It takes a lot of trust to believe what you’re seeing and hearing.”

“The masks are sort of a symbol of it,” he continued. “The bigger thing is social distancing. I mean, crowds together in open spaces, or especially in closed spaces, it’s terrifying. And it takes weeks to see the effects of that. So people will feel like ‘oh, look, we did that. It’s no problem. Hey, look, they did it over there. We can do it here, too.’”

Although there is still a lot to be known about the coronavirus, one thing that Swamy said he pretty much knows for certain is that there doesn’t seem to be herd immunity, which would mean that enough people had the coronavirus that they wouldn’t be able to get it and transmit it again.

“It’s a lot of science that’s unknown there,” he said. “But I think what we know is that we can’t rely on the virus not being able to hop around and catch like wildfire, even in Boston.” 

‘We’re going to see a spike in COVID-19’

Adding to the stress are the recent protests against police brutality that have taken place over the past week in response to the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. 

Large crowds amassed in major cities across the country, and although many of the participants wore face masks, they were still in close proximity to others protesting. Some health officials worry this could cause a new spike in coronavirus cases.

“I am deeply concerned about a super-spreader type of incident,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said on Saturday. “We’re going to see a spike in COVID-19. It’s inevitable.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio voiced similar concerns during recent press conferences, with Cuomo urging people to “demonstrate with a mask on.”

“It’s heartbreaking, because what we see over and over again is two to three weeks later, the cases start hitting and you see a surge and you see spikes,” Swamy said. “I hope that doesn’t happen anywhere else. But the virus is here. It’s everywhere. So it’s heartbreaking. I hope we can get to people before the virus does.”

Health officials worry about second coronavirus wave after George Floyd

Edmund DeMarche of Fox News was also concerned about another spike in the pandemic especially in light of the George Floyd protests. Health officials in the U.S. have new concerns that the nationwide protests over the George Floyd death in police custody could spark a wider spread of the coronavirus after many cities reported bringing the virus under control.

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that there are still some “pockets of spread” in communities. He said there has been an uptick in new coronavirus cases in recent days at the epicenter of the protests.

Minnesota Health Department Spokesman Doug Schultz said Sunday that any spike from the protests will not be seen until six to 10 days after its transmission, the Star Tribune reported. The report pointed out that the Minneapolis provided hundreds of masks for protesters.

Gov. Tim Walz said, according to the paper, that he is “deeply concerned about a super-spreader type of incident … after this. We are going to see a spike in COVID-19. It’s inevitable.”

The U.S. has seen more than 1.7 million infections and over 104,000 deaths in the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected racial minorities. Protests over Floyd’s death have shaken the U.S. from New York to Los Angeles.

“There’s no question that when you put hundreds or thousands of people together in close proximity, when we have got this virus all over the streets … it’s not healthy,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Demonstrators are packed, many without masks, many chanting, shouting or singing. The virus is dispersed by microscopic droplets in the air when people cough, sneeze, talk or sing.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told the New York Times that the “outdoor air dilutes the virus and reduces the infectious dose that might be out there, and if there are breezes blowing, that further dilutes the virus in the air. There was literally a lot of running around, which means they’re exhaling more profoundly, but also passing each other very quickly.”

Despite much of the protest and riots taking place outdoors, looters ransacked stores in various cities. The virus is notoriously transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. The Times reported that Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, told those out protesting to “go get a COVID test this week.”

Fauci Estimates That 100,000 To 200,000 Americans Could Die From The

And now look at Dr. Fauci’s prediction for ultimate mortality rate. Bobby Allyn reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that 100,000 to 200,000 Americans could die of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

The nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases and member of the White House’s coronavirus task force says the pandemic could kill 100,000 to 200,000 Americans and infect millions.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said based on modeling of the current pace of the coronavirus’ spread in the U.S., “between 100,000 and 200,000” people may die from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Fauci’s comments on CNN’s State of the Union underscore just how far away the U.S. is from the peak of the outbreak based on predictions from top federal officials. As of early Sunday afternoon, there were 125,000 cases in the U.S. and nearly 2,200 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Public health experts say that because of undocumented chains of transmission in many parts of the country, the number of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. is set to keep surging as more and more test results become known.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says there could potentially be between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus and millions of cases. “I just don’t think that we really need to make a projection when it’s such a moving target, that you could so easily be wrong,” he

Fauci said the 100,000-to-200,000 death figure is a middle-of-the-road estimate, much lower than worse-case-scenario predictions.

He said preparing for 1 million to 2 million Americans to die from the coronavirus is “almost certainly off the chart,” adding: “Now it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”

However, Fauci cautioned people not to put too much emphasis on predictions, noting that “it’s such a moving target that you could so easily be wrong and mislead people.”

What we do know, he says, is that “we’ve got a serious problem in New York, we’ve got a serious problem in New Orleans and we’re going to have serious problems in other areas.”

Fauci’s coronavirus fatality estimate comes as the White House considers ways to reopen the economy, including easing social distancing guidelines that officials have set forth to curb the spread of the fast-moving virus.

One in three Americans is now being asked to stay indoors as new cases soar, especially in New York, which accounts for nearly half of the country’s cases.

When asked if it is the right time to begin relaxing some of the social distancing measures, Fauci said not until the curve of new infections starts flattening out.

He refused to guess when exactly that may occur.

“The virus itself determines that timetable,” Fauci said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the seasonal flu has killed between 12,000 and 61,000 people a year since 2010. The coronavirus death rate is far greater than the flu’s. For the elderly population, the coronavirus has been found to be six times as deadly.

There is currently no vaccine for the coronavirus. Experts say developing a vaccine for the virus could take at least a year.

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: A Post-Pandemic Prescription

David Nash noted that in what now seems a distant pre-pandemic period, excitement about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare was already escalating. From the academic and clinical fields to the healthcare business and entrepreneurial sectors, there was a remarkable proliferation of AI — e.g., attention-based learning, neural networks, online-meets-offline, and the Internet of Things. The reason for all this activity is clear — AI presents a game-changing opportunity for improving healthcare quality and safety, making care delivery more efficient, and reducing the overall cost of care.

Well before COVID-19 began to challenge our healthcare system and give rise to a greater demand for AI, thought leaders were offering cautionary advice. Robert Pearl, MD, a well-known advocate for technologically advanced care delivery, recently wrote in Forbes that because technology developers tend to focus on what will sell, many heavily marketed AI applications have failed to elevate the health of the population, improve patient safety, or reduce healthcare costs. “If AI is to live up to its hype in the healthcare industry the products must first address fundamental human problems,” Pearl wrote.

In a December 2019 symposium addressing the “human-in-the-middle” perspective on AI in healthcare, internationally acclaimed medical ethicist Aimee van Wynsberghe made the case that ethics are integral to the product design process from its inception. In other words, human values and protections should be central to the business model for AI in healthcare.

Health equity should be a driving principle for how AI is designed and used; however, some models may inadvertently introduce bias and divert resources away from patients in greatest need. Case in point, a predictive AI model was built into a health system’s electronic health record (EHR) to address the issue of “no-show” patients by means of overbooking. Researchers determined that the use of personal characteristics from the EHR (ethnicity, financial class, religion, body mass index) could result in systematic diversion of resources from marginalized individuals. Even a prior pattern of “no-show” was likely to correlate with socioeconomic status and chronic conditions.

Fast forward to today when AI seems to be a permanent fixture in national news coverage. Noting that journalists often overstate the tasks AI can perform, exaggerate claims of its effectiveness, neglect the level of human involvement, and fail to consider related risks, self-professed skeptic Alex Engler offered what I believe are important considerations in his recent article for the Brookings Institution. Here are a few:

• AI is only helpful when applied judiciously by subject-matter experts who are experienced with the problem at hand. Deciding what to predict and framing those predictions is key; algorithms and big data can’t effectively predict a badly defined problem. In the case of predicting the spread of COVID-19, look to the epidemiologists who are building statistical AI models that explicitly incorporate a century of scientific discovery.
• AI alone can’t predict the spread of new pandemics because there is no database of prior COVID-19 outbreaks as there is for the flu. Some companies are marketing products (e.g., video analysis software, AI systems that claim to detect COVID-19 “fever”) without the necessary extensive data and diverse sampling. “Questioning data sources is always a meaningful way to assess the viability of an AI system,” Engler wrote.
• Real-world deployment degrades AI performance. For instance, in evaluating CT scans, an AI model that can differentiate between healthy people and those with COVID-19 might start to fail when it encounters patients who are sick with the regular flu. Regarding claims that AI can be used to measure body temperature, real-world environmental factors lead to measurements that are more imperfect than laboratory conditions.
• Unintended consequences will occur secondary to AI implementation. Consolidation of market power, insecure data accumulation, and surveillance concerns are very common byproducts of AI use. In the case of AI for fighting COVID-19, the surveillance issues have been pervasive in countries throughout the world.
• Although models are often perceived as objective and neutral, AI will be biased. Bias in AI models results in skewed estimates across different subgroups. For example, using biomarkers and behavioral characteristics to predict the mortality risk of COVID-19 patients can lead to biased estimates that do not accurately represent mortality risk. “If an AI model has no documented and evaluated biases, it should increase a skeptic’s certainty that they remain hidden, unresolved, and pernicious,” said Engler.

Based on what we’ve learned about the limitations and potential harms of AI in healthcare — much of which has been amplified by COVID-19 — what treatment plan would I prescribe going forward? First, I would encourage all healthcare AI developers and vendors to involve ethicists, clinical informatics experts, and operational experts from the inception of product development.

Second, I would recommend that healthcare AI be subjected to a higher level of scrutiny. Because AI is often “built in” by a trusted business partner and easily implemented, objective evaluation may be waived. As data science techniques become increasingly complex, serious consideration must be given to multidisciplinary oversight of all AI in healthcare.

Another paper that I am working reviews the need for a more complete method to contact trace and follow-up the recovered as well as those not infected on a large scale so that we can predict the next spike early. This way we can avoid the horrid effect of a second pandemic and the ultimate effect on healthcare and the economy.