Summer Won’t Save Us from COVID-19
Life right now, for someone who studies respiratory virus infections, can be hectic and alarming. Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology as well as molecular, cellular, and development biology at the Yale School of Medicine, hasn’t had a weekend or any break, really, for the last several weeks. Her lab has been scrambling, working nearly nonstop, to ensure that people around Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, can be tested for COVID-19.
“It’s totally organic and grassroots,” she said, “because we don’t have enough kits coming from the federal government, not even from the state.” Her lab can test hundreds of people at a time—the capacity isn’t the problem. It’s all the red tape, the need to acquire the right sorts of approval for testing. “This should have been actually coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control in a rapid and uniform manner,” she said, “But it hasn’t. This has been an absolute nightmare for everyone.”
On the phone, in her office at Yale, Iwasaki seemed relieved to have cleared a major hurdle, and happy to be able to discuss a new paper she and her colleagues published in the Annual Review of Virology. The researchers describe the seasonality of respiratory viral infections, including SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the growing number of COVID-19 cases worldwide. This pandemic is all she’s been thinking about. “We can’t do any research that’s unrelated to COVID anymore,” she said.
