 You are tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM, low-power community radio, Davis, California. I'm Autumn Labbe Renault and today is Tuesday, June 30th. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can listen anytime at KDRT.org and I'm here live on Tuesdays. My guest today is Dr. Kuhn VanRompe. He is a virologist at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis with expertise in non-human primate models of viral infections. He's worked extensively on HIV and Zika virus and is now part of a cooperative effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine. He's also the founder of Sahaya International, a Davis-based nonprofit. He found it that builds awareness and support of healthcare, education, environmental and socio-economic grassroots programs in developing countries. And I will bring you that interview in just a few minutes. You feel a sense of urgency to share as many local updates and resources as possible because the situation just keeps changing rapidly and the outlook and everything that's unknown is a source of concern for so many of us. Daily, we are bombarded with news stories about the elusive and perplexing nature of the virus, the search for a vaccine, and the economic realities of the pandemic. Just this week, Davis featured prominently in a New York Times article about the long-term economic impact the pandemic will wreak on college towns. It's not a great outlook. Over the weekend, we reached 10 million cases of coronaviruses, coronavirus and half a million deaths worldwide. In California, the news grew increasingly dire with nine California counties reporting a spike in new cases or hospitalizations of confirmed cases. The counties are Los Angeles, Sacramento, Fresno, Imperial, San Bernardino, San Joaquin, Tulare, Kings and Santa Clara, and together, they contain nearly half of California's population. The rising concern in California comes as 21 U.S. states reported weekly increases in new cases of COVID-19, with Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posting rises of 40% or higher. Close to home, Sacramento County reported 33 hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients and 14 in its intensive care units over the weekend, with public health officials attributing the rise in infections to recent gatherings, including birthday parties and a funeral, and one cluster to a single traveler who visited family in Sacramento and infected many family members. So the message here is stay home if you can. And in breaking news yesterday, bars in Sacramento County have been shut down again per county health order. According to Governor Newsom's office, new diagnoses in the heavily populated Los Angeles area are going up in part because testing is more widely available. And of course, but they also say that infections and hospitalizations in most other parts of the states are driven by factors tied directly to the loosening of restrictions or the overt flouting of public health rules. Of course, that raises fears that authorities may have to reimpose or tighten public health restrictions aimed at slowing the viruses spread. In other words, that which has been opened up may be subject to shutting down again and looking at the bars in Sacramento. There you go. Although our numbers in Yolo County have remained low, and I'm going to talk about that more in the show, low relative to some of these other counties, they have been trending upwards. In my recent interview with Dr. Mary Ann Limbos, the public health officer for Yolo County, she said, I really want to encourage our communities not to undo the hard work and sacrifice that residents have put in over the past few months. The biggest message I want to convey is please stay home. And when you do go out to support our local businesses, wear a face mask covering and practice social distancing to the greatest extent possible. We've worked together this far. Let's not give up now. And finally, the COVID-19 testing site in West Sacramento has had its run extended through this Friday, July 3rd. That's free testing. And you can get more info about that and everything else related to the pandemic here in Yolo County at Yolo County.org. And we'll be back with our interview in just a minute. I first met my guest many years ago when he attended a meeting of Suroptimist International of Davis to talk about his work with Sahaya International. Over time, I learned about his groundbreaking work helping to develop and test the antiviral drug tenofovir used in the prevention and treatment of HIV. He is another community member we're so fortunate to have access to due to our proximity to UC Davis. He's a virologist at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis with expertise in non-human primate models of viral infections. I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Koon Van Rompay. Hi, Koon. How are you? Hi, good. Thank you very much for having me on the show again. Thank you. You bet. It's nice to hear from you. So one of my earlier interviews with Dr. John Amazette, who's an epidemiologist, was about how viruses spill over from animal to human populations. As a virologist working with non-human primates, your work comes a little later in that train. Let's start with talking about what role animals play in the development of vaccines. Yes, sure. So basically it has been shown several months ago that several animal species can also get infected with the COVID-19 virus. And so for example, there are a number of rodent models that have been developed. For example, hamsters can get infected and hamsters actually get quite sick. It was also found that if you infect macaques, healthy adult monkeys, they also get infected and they have mild symptoms. So it really resembles the majority of infections in humans. And so it has also been shown that this is actually a very useful animal model. There are many research teams and so we are also part of one of them that are now using this macaque model to test interventions such as vaccines and also antiviral drugs. And so some of the data look quite promising. And of course these results can actually help to push these interventions into human trials. Okay, I've read about two different sort of trains here. Some virologists are working. This is to counter coronavirus COVID-19. Some are working with compounds that have previously been approved for other uses. And while others are working with compounds that have not been tested, where do you fall on that spectrum? Yeah, so right now we are actually falling in the first category mostly. Because the thing is there are a number of compounds that have antiviral properties. So many of them have already been used against other viruses. And so of course for those we have a lot of information on what's the safety, what dose should you give to animals or to humans. So it actually goes a lot faster if you can take something off the shelf of which you already have some background data. Instead of starting from the scratch board here where you really have to first figure out what dose would you use to give sufficient levels in the body and also then whether that dose is really safe or not. Yeah, so one phrase we hear a lot these days is when we have a vaccine or when a vaccine is developed. But I get the sense that that process can take an awfully long time. Can you tell us a bit more about where you start and where you hope to end up in developing a vaccine? Yeah, so basically the development of a vaccine is really very time consuming. Because of course you really want to make sure that the vaccine works. But also say above all you want the vaccine to be safe. So with some other viruses sometimes there have been vaccines that were developed that looked promising early on. But then when they were actually rolled out on massive scale it was discovered that some of those vaccines actually had serious side effects. Sometimes for example that happened with the vaccine against the dengue virus. That subpopulations of people actually became more susceptible if they had first received the vaccine. So that's actually a very big risk. So that's something that really has to be done. So that's why the whole process of vaccine development is quite slow. We are now also gearing up to become part of a large network of different payment centers where we are actually going to test several vaccines that are now already in human trials. And so that look promising so far really do a head to head comparison in monkeys. With regard to the efficacy and regard to safety so that if for example it's in humans that each of these vaccines seems to kind of work. The monkey data can actually then help us to tell us which vaccine of all of those seems to be the most effective one. But also one of the big questions with vaccines is also when people are also animals are vaccinated how long does it give protection. Because of course ideally we want a vaccine that if somebody gets immunized they would be protected for at least several years and hopefully for many years. Right. And there's you know a lot of us are reading a lot of different things but not all of us are virologists which is why I'm so glad to have you here. But I read over the weekend the Washington Post wrote an article about the G variant in COVID-19. Essentially there's already this virus is mutating. So what do such mutations mean for vaccine development. Yes that's something that's a very good question. So the virus is slowly mutating and so people are now trying to figure out does it really affect how the virus behaves. So far it seems that the mutations that have been discovered don't seem to be in regions that would affect the efficacy of most of the vaccines that are right now being developed. So that's at least kind of promising. But it's really something that we really need to be keeping a very close eye on. So how does the virus mutate and how do those mutations kind of map compared to what are your targets for your vaccines. Right. So I'm curious about there are a lot of coronaviruses. You know COVID-19 is the one that has caught our attention this year. But have you actually worked on vaccine development for any of the others. Has that been part of your work. So far my vaccine development has mostly been on HIV and Zika virus. So I have never really worked on developing vaccines against coronavirus. I know there is a lot of interest because of course as you mentioned there are many different coronaviruses. Some companies are actually working on trying to develop what they call a pan-coronavirus vaccine. Trying to identify regions that are very common among the different coronaviruses. So that hopefully you can have one vaccine that may get protection against all of them. So that we would hopefully be better prepared against future outbreaks. Talk about a rapidly evolving field. I imagine that you were kind of thrown into this a few months ago when everything started and you shifted your work. Is that true? Yes that's true. Basically six months ago I mean you would hear on the news very briefly about outbreaks in China. All of a sudden of course when early this year it really spread across the globe. All of a sudden we got kind of thrown into this. Most of us kind of stopped most of our research. Of course we use the expertise, the background we have, the teams that we had to work on HIV. Many of those teams have now really changed the focus of the laboratories to work on this new coronavirus. I think your field of virology is going to be the field in this century and moving forward because again from what I'm reading there's COVID-19 but there may be other viruses around the corner and things we can't even fathom yet. I don't want to scare people but I think that's true right? Of course what we're also learning from this I mean the basic knowledge that we get from here I mean from studying this current coronavirus will also help us to really attack future epidemics a lot more. And I think it also highlights that we really need to invest more. We really need to invest more in research facilities, train many more young investigators to really encourage them to enter this research field. So that we would really be much much better prepared for the next outbreak. We're going to need them that's for sure. Well on the topic of young folks let me use that as a jumping off point so we can switch gears and talk about Sahaya International. Which I think is your, you sound pretty passionate about your work as a virologist but I think Sahaya International is your true passion project. Please tell us about this nonprofit you found it. Yes basically I founded this nonprofit about 20 years ago. So I never really imagined myself starting an HRT work but then in 1997 I was invited to present some of my HIV research at a conference in South India. And so there I was as a researcher trying to deal with the HIV epidemic but yet when I saw people living on the street in Chennai I was very depressed because I saw look these people have so many issues and I decided to do something. I met a social worker there. He kind of inspired me and then slowly thanks to the help of friends here in Davis I decided to start my own charity and so we have been growing over the past 20 years. Even though our big focus is still the several programs in South India over the years we've also been able to expand our programs to Kenya, Vietnam, Philippines, Uganda. So we are all volunteer based. We are really a large network of friends. We are almost a safe family helping to raise money making a difference. So tell us about the kinds of work you're supporting in these countries and I'm just going to read them off again because I pulled this from your website. India, Vietnam, Philippines, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Yeah so one of the largest programs that we have in almost all of those countries is we help needed children and orphans. So we link sponsors here in the US and in Europe with children in India, Vietnam and Kenya and so sponsors here provide some monthly support and in return they didn't receive a letter and lots of photographs. So that's actually been very rewarding because we started this program in India about 20 years ago. So several of the kids that I met during my first trips there to India are now actually becoming say, are now adults. So many of them have completed their schooling. Many of them have finished college. They are working. So it's actually been very rewarding. Especially if you consider a number of those children when I met them they were sick because of HIV. We were able to get them sent to a local HIV clinic. We will put them on HIV medicines. And right now these children have gone up. They are adults. They are productive. Several of them got married, have children who are healthy. So it's been really very rewarding that we can give people who are in dire need a much better future. And you're very personally vested in this work. Obviously on Facebook you refer to many of these folks as your sons and daughters. Yes, because I have known so many of them over the years and so of course many of these children have lost both parents and so they cannot see me as either a father or uncle. And so I actually communicate with them very much because many of them also are active on WhatsApp and so almost every day I get messages from them. And so it's actually for me very rewarding. I feel I have this family across the globe. So sometimes even when, for example, in research there are always good days and bad days where sometimes you want to say I'm not able to make much progress in my research or so. But then I always think at least we're able to make a difference. I think even if you can make a difference in the life of one child that's more than worth it. Yeah. Can you share a success story? You know, one of the kids who you've watched grown up and has gone on to live their life and do good things? Yeah, for example, one of the children that's very close to my heart is Monisha. I met her when she was five years old. So she has HIV. Both her parents had died. She was raised by her grandparents. So her future looked very bleak, especially when her grandfather passed away. But then I was able to link her to one of my friends here in Davis. And my friends were able to provide some monthly support to her. So we were able to get Monisha started on HIV medicines. So she was able to become more healthy. She is able to get through school. Because of course of HIV condition she had to travel to the clinic every month. So that somehow inspired her. So when she finished high school she decided to start nursing school. And so she finished nursing school about two years ago. And right now she's working as a nurse for our partner organization in South India. So she really helps the school children. She helps the other HIV-infected children with simple physical checkups. She also helps with a network that we have created for HIV-positive children. So in addition to giving them medical support she also gives them counseling. She does fun creative activities with them. Because I think giving children a future is more than just the physical things. Giving them food, sending them to school. You also have to give these children hope. Yeah, you're investing in them as fellow human beings. They're not just someone living in another country who needs help. That's wonderful. That's what they call a full circle story. Where you can give your input and make a difference and see it come to fruition. That's wonderful. So I also wanted to ask you how the pandemic is affecting Sahaya's work. Because for example I know that you usually have a big event every October. And it's very hard to plan for events and things right now. So how are you getting the word out? Yeah, exactly. So of course we're still planning our event in October. But instead of making it a real event we're going to see if we can do something online here. So where we can really perhaps have several people who are representing some of the work that we are doing. I'm also of course very active on social media. So I keep posting stories from India, Kenya, our other partners there. You really make people feel connected. In the countries where we are active, many of these countries are also still on the lockdown. So the situation is actually becoming very dire. People don't have jobs. Often people cannot really travel. So we're grateful that a number of my friends, especially here in Davis, have already been able to step up their support so that we can actually send some extra money to the partner organizations there. And they are able to provide the basic necessities such as some extra food and clothing to the people who are the most in Asia. So I'm very grateful that people haven't really given up. There are many good people here in this world who even when times are challenging here for us in the US who still keep their heart open. That's actually for me very heartwarming as something that really inspires me. I'm glad that you're able to feel that and experience that. I've had the experience too during the pandemic of, you know, there are a lot of people who were on the edge who were going over the edge of a lot that's wrong. But I've also seen just incredible kindness bubbling up to the surface and people wanting to be connected. Yeah, in fact, I think especially during these difficult times, I think we see that many people even step beyond here and really realize, look, we are in this together here. Things that happen in other parts of the world also really affect what I say, the things here. So that's I think something that I really hope that will come out of this epidemic that once we have a vaccine, once we have a good treatment, that we will be able to come out of this epidemic in a stronger way and with a more global sense of look, we are all interconnected. We really have to help each other. We live on this very same planet. We can also work together to tackle other issues such as global warming. Yeah, if nothing else, a tiny virus has illustrated how connected we all are. Let's make sure we give people a place where they can get more information about the work you do with Sahaya International. Yeah, so basically people can go to our website. So it's www.sahaya. And Sahaya is spelled S-A-H-A-Y-A dot O-R-G. And so people can also easily find my personal contact information. I would be more than happy to talk to them directly. Right, I also imagine, I know you travel a lot and generally for Sahaya and for your work. And I'm imagining that you're pretty grounded right now and here at UC Davis, which is why I had an opportunity to talk to you today. All right, well I want to thank you for your time and thank you for the work you're doing. It's really important. I know that for some people talking about medical research done on animals is challenging. But I know in all your materials you make it really clear that it's essential if we are to develop vaccines and such. Sure, thank you very much. All right. Thanks so much. Take good care. Thanks very much. Bye. That was Dr. Kuhn Van Roomphe, a virologist at the UC Davis National Research Primate Center. And head of Sahaya International. I'm going to repeat the URL for that website again. It's sahaya.org. S-A-H-A-Y-A. I'm going to take just a minute or two for music here and I'll be back with my wrap up. Okay, we have a few minutes left. And I'm going to end by with a big quote that I saw on Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor's Facebook page. He wrote this last night and these are important words to hear right now. COVID-19 is alive and spreading in Yolo County. Our case count has doubled in the past two weeks. Each day at about 5 p.m., the Yolo County COVID-19 dashboard is updated to display the number of people who have tested positive for the virus and other key indicators. For the past several weeks, we've experienced a disturbing increase in the number of COVID cases. As of last night, June 29, Don wrote the dashboard reports a total of 505 COVID-19 cases in Yolo County, which is an increase of 26 new cases over the day before. And we've been seeing a lot of that the last couple weeks, big jumps almost daily. Of the 505 cases, 251 or about half were identified within the past 14 days. A common public health tracking concept is the rate of cases per 100,000 population. Yolo County has 220,000 people and 505 cases as of June 29. So our rate of positive cases per 100,000 people is 229. And according to the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, on June 29, the rate of cases per 100,000 population for California is 534 and for the United States as a whole is 777. Don continues the Yolo County coronavirus dashboard displays the distribution of Yolo County COVID cases within the cities and unincorporated areas of the county. Here are the cases per 100,000 by jurisdiction as of June 29. Winters 386, Woodland 358, West Sacramento 312, unincorporated areas 97 and Davis 73. Don concludes Independence Day is just around the corner. Many of the new cases identified over the past few weeks have been tracked to social gatherings around Memorial Day, graduations and other large group gatherings. For our own safety and for those around us, it remains critical for all of us to continue safe practices outlined in guidance documents issued by the state in Yolo County. And I know I sound like this is me autumn now I sound like a broken record but frequent hand washing sanitizing physical distance and face coverings. Don notes we are in this together. And you can reach him at dawn dot sailor SAYLOR at Yolo County org and he holds regular office hours on zoom. I am going to wrap up here for today. I thank you for tuning in and I thank you for your support of local community radio. From the KDRT studio. I'm autumn lab a Renault and this has been the COVID-19 community report.