U.S. cases of coronavirus surge over 330,000

Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, former team lead at the CDC Global Rapid Response Team, spoke with Yahoo Finance about the current state of coronavirus in the United States and how the country is handling the pandemic.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. Myles Udland here in New York. We're joined now by Dr. Cyrus Shahpar. He's the former team lead of the CDC's Global Rapid Response Team, currently a director at Resolve to Save Lives. So Dr. Shahpar, thanks for joining the program today.

And I just want to start with your view of the coronavirus outbreak here in the United States, as it stands on April 6th. The market today, investors who are not medical professionals, they are looking at what's happening in the tri-state area, and they are excited by those trends. As you see the virus outbreak right now, are you as encouraged by some of that data?

CYRUS SHAHPAR: I'm encouraged that the New York situation seems to be flattening out. But you have to understand there's a lot of room to grow in the rest of the country. And the way we've implemented measures across the states is uneven. So we have more ahead than is behind us.

MYLES UDLAND: So let's talk-- yeah, let's talk about that implementation. It's been uneven across the country. There's certainly signs that social distancing works. That's kind of the long and short of it. As you see the response broadly and you look back for the last few weeks, what are the things that have been the biggest mistakes and what are the things that actually are helping us now and our strategies that we need to kind of push ahead with?

CYRUS SHAHPAR: Yeah, we kind of had a delayed onset, you know, January, February time. We had delayed rollout of lab testing, which gave us an incomplete picture of what's going on. We really were flying blind for a while because we didn't know who was infected or who wasn't, so we told everybody to stay inside, which is a good strategy.

I think moving forward, like I said, we have a lot more room ahead, and it's important for the whole country to be on the same page. Otherwise, we're kind of limited by the least protected group. Because as a United States of America, really, the situation as a whole depends on whoever is the most vulnerable in terms of states.

There's eight states out there which don't have a statewide order to shelter in place right now, which means they haven't started the process to help-- to have physical distancing help their populations. You know, states like South Carolina, Arkansas, Wyoming, Utah, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota-- I think there's another one in there-- those states haven't had-- they have cases and they haven't told people to stay inside, which means that's just going to delay the whole country in recovering from this.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Dr. Shahpar, Rick Newman here. So investors today seem excited that we're getting some signs of flattening the curve. But flattening the curve is a waypoint, not an endpoint. So we can get to a point where we've all socially distanced and we have-- we begin to contain the virus. But what do we do then? You know, that doesn't mean restaurants and nail salons are going to reopen.

So what are the steps we need to get through where we can actually begin reopening those businesses? And how long do you think that's going to take?

CYRUS SHAHPAR: Yeah, right now, everybody-- the government's told everybody to stay home for April. At the same time, the government and the health care system needs to be working really hard to have society be in a place to be able to release people back into society.

And that means they need to have good ways to track the virus. We need to have a health care system that has too much PPE and health care workers not too little. And we need to have public health systems to be able to find cases when everybody goes back out there, test them, and isolate them, so it doesn't spread into the population.

But this is just the beginning of what we see and others see as several peaks in terms of the virus. It's not going anywhere. So just because we say it's over and it's better, we're going to see a rise as people re-enter society. And are we equipped to deal with that, and do we have to turn some things back on? That's the general strategy every country in the world is talking about.

So it's not like this is going to be over May 1st, and then we're all going to go outside, and everything is going to be back to normal. There's still a virus out there and still people who are susceptible. So what is the strategy moving forward, and how do we get ready to do that?

ANDY SERWER: So Dr. Shahpar, you have an MD From the University of California, Irvine. I also see you have a MBA from the University of California, Irvine. So you kind of got both sides of the brain working, right? You've got the medical part and the business part. So you understand when people want to open their businesses up. But it's sort of a little bit of a follow-up for what Rick just asked, but how do we possibly make that call? You know, President Trump, the cure is worse than disease and all that kind of stuff.

CYRUS SHAHPAR: Yeah, I mean, there are essential services that could open. We could have better testing that tells us who perhaps has immunity and can go out safely. Serologic testing is coming. The first test was approved in the United States within the past week. As we get better information about the virus, who has it, if we have immunity, then parts of society can open safely.

And it's just increasing our ability to figure this out, to learn who has the virus, to have the health care system be ready to take care of people who get severely ill, and to trace those and say, hey, you know what? You have coronavirus active right now. You should stay home. Be better about that kind of information. Right now, it's more blanket guidance because we don't have that granularity of information. But we do need to restart essential services at some point.

MYLES UDLAND: All right, Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, formerly with the CDC, currently with Resolve to Save Lives. Thanks so much for the time today. We'll talk to you soon.

CYRUS SHAHPAR: Sure, thanks.