The number of Pine Belt coronavirus cases are expected to hit their peak in the next two weeks, and the prospect of finding a vaccine to fight COVID-19 in the next year is low, a Hattiesburg health professional said Wednesday during an online business-oriented panel discussion.
Dr. Rambod Rouhbakhsh of Hattiesburg Clinic was one of five panelists included in “Maneuvering Through the Crisis – COVID-19 UPDATE,” which was sponsored by the Area Development Partnership. Other panelists were Hattiesburg Mayor Toby Barker, New South Restaurant Group owner Robert St. John, and Hoppy Cole, ADP Chairman and The First Bancshares president and CEO.
ADP President Chad Newell served as the moderator.
Rouhbakhsh said the best things to happen to develop a vaccine or therapy to fight coronavirus are to find a game-changer or to get lucky.
“I'm hoping something comes of this that's unexpected because so many unexpected things have arisen as people have banded together and are pooling their resources,” he noted. “But, the evidence thus far has been very poor for the treatments that have been proposed. We need a game-changer or this is going to be with us for a very, very long time.”
Rouhbakhsh said a game-changer would be medications that thus far have really struck out or a vaccine.
“Or we need to get lucky,” he said. “What I mean by getting lucky is if we distance long enough and the disease doesn't pass and kind of dies out and may not come back. That's not been the case with other viruses like this; it always comes back.”
Vaccines typically take 10-15 years, Rouhbakhsh shared.
“They have to prove safety is much, much higher than a therapeutic because you're giving back to otherwise healthy people,” he said. “There is hope that with the expanded and kind of streamline processes, we may have a vaccine that's available for market within a year.”
Mayor Barker said the pace of making decisions involving coronavirus quickened exponentially. He explained that officials have had to navigate through decisions and change plans and schedules at a much faster rate than normal. Barker said the city stepped forward with a stakeholder group of health care, education, and other government leaders.
“We had to make a lot of tough calls,” he said. “I never would have thought we would have made as many tough calls as we had to make over the last 30 days.”
Hattiesburg has concentrated on two goals since COVID-19 became a local problem, Barker said.
“I try to go back to this at every briefing,” he said. “One, we have to protect the most vulnerable, which is our people over the age of 60. There's a lot of those in our community and people with underlying chronic health conditions; that's the principal goal – to protect them. (The second goal) is preventing an overrun of our healthcare system. We have a certain number of beds in this community; so, everything we do concentrates on those two goals.”
St. John’s role on the ADP panel was as a local businessman who is dealing with protecting his 300 employees from the coronavirus, obtaining unemployment for those same employees, and then preparing to restart his business when the health problem is gone.
“We're dealing in new territory businesswise,” he said. “There's so much unknown at this point. Our main focus at least till now has been the health and safety of our employees.”
St. John said efforts were also made to help his employees family-wise and with navigating through the process of getting government assistance. He communicated that his company did a mass filing for unemployment to help all employees. Moving forward, he said he sees two points to focus on.
“First, how do we survive it and then how do we thrive afterwards,” he said. “We need to take advice from the leadership of the city, the leadership of the state and the leadership of the medical professionals and do what they say.”
On the banking side, Cole said the financial atmosphere was in outstanding shape before COVID-19 became a factor.
“No. 1, the economy was in really good shape before this started,” he said. “The income levels, net worth, debt levels for the individual consumer were in really, really good shape. No. 2, the banking industry was the best it’s ever been in terms of capitalization, liquidity, and diversification. Those are things that we learned of the 2008-09 crisis, but in all cases banks are in so much better position to be able to help.”