 Marcia Joyner and we are navigating the journey and today's journey is into the world of the coronavirus. Of course everybody everywhere is talking about it but we today have a very special person that deals with viruses all the time. I'm going to talk to Mike and those of you that have been with me know only talk to dear we are going to talk to dr. T at the wiki key at doctors of wiki key okay you know i'd get it wrong but anyway it is the doctors of wiki key and dr. T he is such a such a special person um and so dr. T is with us he's they got patient stacked up but he agreed to spend some time with us and dr. T and his ukulele dr. T thank you thank you so much for being with us and let's tell us about dr. T before we get into the virus tell us about dr. T well i've been a physician practicing physician over 25 years i've been on two other islands in hawaii uh i used to practice also in florida and then i was in macedonia where i were coming here so my ancestry is from macedonia i was born in united states we moved back after i finished high school got into medical school there finished medical school worked for one year there and came back to united states and then i've been in united since ever since but and through the path of life i found my way to uh hawaii and i've been here over 16 years and i'm really happy here and then i opened a practice with dr. Wu doctors of wiki key over a year ago we've been doing really well it's an urgent care and we do primary care and we specialize in internal medicine and we take care of patients every which way we can and right now we all have to learn midnight yes and marcia at midnight and we have to deal with yes come our way and what something that's going to come our way it's going to be inevitable will be the coronavirus no matter how hard we try we're not able to coronavirus from yeah coming so it's not a matter of what well let's it's when you know if uh well uh the practice that you have the doctors of wiki key is in the princess kaiolani hotel which means that you are primarily dealing with uh tourist now you're violating how many does your staff have i i thoughts of the body we have so since since we're our location we deal with a lot of tourists i'd say 60 of our businesses tourists the rest are locals we are oriented towards the tourist industry because we have over the half the staff speaks japanese or japanese nationals that have you know moved here and now they work here and then we have chinese speaking we have i speak slavic languages like macedonian serbian bulgarian i can understand and speak some russian and luke ukrainian then we have spanish speaking korean speaking page you know a personnel that can help from all aspects of uh different languages to help them with their care but uh yes we do deal with a lot of tourists we can do x-rays we can do laboratory we can have medications we can dispense we can do sutures we have a complimentary shuttle to pick people up in the wiki key area and bring them to the clinic and take them home we do house about that yeah so we shuttle which is absolutely gorgeous the car yeah we have a tesla model x that comes and picks up the customers from their home model x what is it called the model x the one with the gulwing doors it's like a big it's a big custom van made by tesla to drive around as green as you can get and it's really cool car because the doors open up and people can get its easy access to really cool ambulance so with wheelchairs and everything you can get in easily yeah you easily get in because load of the ground we have drivers that come pick you up help you go to your room bring you down and then like i said earlier we do house calls that i didn't know yeah well yes but what because what is because so many asian uh tourists are there any issues with the carers you know people are so scared i'm not sure that i understand we've had all kind of viruses before what what makes this one different other than the but only that what makes this one different is that it's new that the body does not have immunity towards it and that we don't know how to deal with it because it's new we don't have medications that are designed to treat it we don't have a vaccine to try to prevent it so and it and it can be unpredictable we don't know what kind of direction this can go in this might go in a direction where it'll run its course through the world and then go away or it might be here to stay and might mutate and cause other problems but the virus the best thing we can do to deal with it is like what we've been doing normally for flu prevention and cough and cold prevention is washing your hands and protecting yourself from other people who are sick if you're sick don't go to work stay home other than that if you think you're ill you go and see your doctor you know if you have a fever but there are hot spots throughout the world currently and a lot of them are in asia china we know korea now a little bit in japan there's iran we have cases in the united states most of them right now heavily situated in lake in a kirkland kirkland washington in this nursing home scenario but there's a lot of information out there now my my take on the virus would be i think there's too much panic going on because there's there's some chance of death now there's chance of death for many diseases like the like the flu people die when they get the flu but the percentage of mortality or chance of dying from the coronavirus as far as we know is a little bit higher than the flu so what that means is people will get sick some people have no symptoms some people will get sick some people will get really small percentage of those people who get sick will get really sick and a small percentage of those people that really sick can die it does not mean everyone's going to die but but the ordinary flu lots of people die every year so what's the difference well so what's the difference there's a smaller percentage they believe even though we don't have conclusive data yet there's a smaller higher chance of death for the coronavirus higher chance of death because it's new or different or what well we don't know how to treat it what what no no well no we know how to treat the flu and we know how to treat a lot of things but still people die the problem with this virus is it's new meaning that humans have never had contact as far as we know with this virus so we have no natural immunity so all the things that exist in the world viruses and bacteria that are currently out there we've had some exposure to because of the world the way it is and people are traveling and the world's a big place but it's gotten very small because of travel and so things that we naturally get naturally get in contact with our body forms some type of immunity sometimes it's really good immunity you never get sick again some it's very mild but it is some type of immunity towards this other viruses well coronavirus is a new virus humans have never had exposure to this virus and that's why the body has a hard time harder time dealing with it than other other viruses it's a lot so a lot of detail that you know i'm still we build and naturally normally we build a natural immunity to certain things like even though we get colds all the time they don't kill us it's because we've developed immunity to some parts of that cold virus but the coronavirus we have no ever had exposure to we have no immunity to the coronavirus oh now those that do get sick as now as far as we know this is what i've learned is that if you do get the coronavirus your body develops an immunity and you don't get it anymore so that's the case then it's going to run its course throughout the world and it's going to go away coronavirus will go away if it mutates like some viruses can do well then it's going to continue to infect humans and till it stops mutating but so far there's no evidence that it's mutating and so it should run its course through the world and be done well since you had so many patient Asia is have you seen a difference in the numbers of patients from Asia or has it stayed the same are people still coming everything has been the same up until recently but this is a normal decrease in tourism that happens in March but more than once we get cases here in Hawaii it's going to probably affect it's going to probably affect tourism more so what when they're canceling so many events that are large events like the Honolulu festival and what and those most of those people come from islands in the until now we haven't heard of anything affecting them would that really make a difference those people that haven't been infected would that really make a difference as opposed to let's say Italy or China I don't know Marsha I think isolation to some degree helps but just like the flu it's easily transmitted and something that's easily transmitted to other people is really hard to contain if it was just in a room and there was one person and it didn't escape that room that's great but once it gets out of that room and affects two people three people four people like anything it's going to continue to spread it's already in certain hot spots throughout the world so there's no way that it's not going to continue on its course it's a virus they're very easily transmitted and be impossible unless we could isolate every human being in the world which is not possible when now this area that it's what we say it started in China is one one town and then all of a sudden it shows up in Italy that is it mutate or travel because people travel so how did they get to Korea how did they get outside of how did they get to the United States you know people travel and they got they didn't know it and they brought it and then they kiss their wife and just so odd that it would would be a little town in Italy it just seems so odd well Italy like us is a tourist attraction and people go to I think it was Venice or Florence I can't remember I think it's Venice I don't know somewhere in Italy is it Florence do you know doesn't matter no I don't know it's a tourist center and so people from China people from Korea went there and they didn't necessarily have to have symptoms because now we know that you don't have to be have symptoms and still have the virus and you can pass the virus on to somebody else and then they can get sick you might not be sick at all well now what is the difference in the virus like any virus as opposed to bacteria we get when we have a cold what what's the difference there viruses are in a different category as a microorganism that causes illness in humans and animals and bacteria and their way they survive and they're transmitted is much different than bacteria there are some interlap between both of them meaning so let's look at the common cold the common cold when it affects a human it travels to its respiratory tract to its nose and its mouth and that's where it's replicated so when you sneeze it's actually spreading the virus the cold virus to substitute to articles places in the room your hands and then somebody will either be sneezed on and get the virus in the sneeze or I sneeze on the table and they'll touch the table with their hands and touch their mouth and get the virus that way bacteria tend to be in a lot of objects around us in the water they can be on the in the dirt but we need to have more contact with them than the virus to get sick there are bacteria on our skin that's it's different you know viruses spread a lot easier than bacteria do in the community they're designed to do that that's how they've evolved as a microorganism as a as an entity to spread throughout the human population or the animal population or even the bacterial population there's viruses that attack bacteria called bacteria oh yeah so viruses are thrown whole spectrum of things that are alive they can cause disease so um how many viruses do we have how many different viruses there's a family the ones I've learned were the family of viruses that cause health problems humans but there are so many there are viruses that are just for cats there's viruses just for dogs there's viruses that attack cows horses insects bacteria you know so there's viruses it's like it's a whole population of microorganisms that like humans want to survive except they don't have a conscience they don't have I guess they don't have a conscience they don't have a not one that we know of they're a very simple life that know how to replicate and they've evolved to replicate in certain species and for example the flu virus is one the cold virus is another there's hepatitis virus there's the virus that cause polio there's viruses and there's myriad of them but there's so many viruses out there and there's some that cause much more health problems like the flu does currently than the coronavirus flu is still killing more people we said this initially than the coronavirus has now will coronavirus end up killing more people than the flu maybe one day maybe maybe not we don't know now when we first heard about this they said that it was transmitted from bats in China that's a delicacy I guess from bats to humans this do they well how would that work well the theory the theory is remember I was saying that viruses can infect a lot of different things right so there's a bat virus a bat cold virus this is coronavirus this is this this is the theory now that this coronavirus was a virus that bats had it was like they're they're common cold it didn't kill them they would get the sniffles you know they're mammals like us they would cough they might have got a fever and then they would pass and then it would you know move on but somehow sometimes viruses that are for certain animals can transfer to humans and if that happens then we have a trouble like we're having now coronavirus because the body does not have immunity never been exposed to that virus and that's why it becomes a problem it's not because they eat that soup it's because bats are sold in the market in china because it is a delicacy in china and that's where they're assuming that in the open market the bats were infected and then the handlers of the bats or people that were cutting the bat meat got the virus breed the virus in and then they got infected initially and that's how it started then he spread it to his family and then the family to another families and that's the theory that's the theory well there were years ago you're too young to remember this but years ago before we had really laws about handling meat remember the meat packers and how bad that was and so we have come a long way since then i hope but but at that time were there viruses spread among the slaughter houses and out to the public before we were we got a handle sure there were a lot of diseases back before we're talking about 120 to 130 years ago there were no laws and there was very poor hygiene and animal slaughter houses there was very poor hygiene for processing meat meat products hundreds some years ago and of course there were some illnesses that people got that handled the meat and i'm trying to think of one that would come to mind i can't think of any right now but yes there are things that could have happened back then that could have been an issue and now the coronavirus could be related to processing the bat meat or the mats were sick and the handler of the bats got sick but that's where it's hey yep pick one little town in china out of as big as china is how did they select one tiny community in china and just like anything and who knows why i who knows why why it started in muan i don't know i've just just now it's just amazes me as big as china is with as many people how they said this is where it started well you know it's rare the transmission from an animal virus into a human is rare it's not a very common thing and so you know it just bad luck it's just bad luck it's just like getting cancer it's bad luck and so the person handling the bats had bad luck and the bat had just the right virus in the right time and it happened if that's what it is who know we don't know that's what we're assuming uh well that's that's what they're telling us anyway yeah so now there are people at least i've read about people that had no symptoms and then somehow they pass it on yeah how does that work how do we pass on if we have no symptoms we don't even know we've got it well there are degrees of everything so chicken pox so some people get a really bad rash everywhere you get really sick you can even get hospitalized when they get a chicken pox there's a small percentage of people who died when they got chicken pox and there are some people who when they got chicken pox they would just get one puck so just like everything if there's a variation in how people respond to an illness or a virus or a bacteria and that's the same thing as being true with the coronavirus there have been no children no children have died there are children have gotten sick but no children have died and children team to be having a very mild form of the disease they might not have any symptoms at all so some people don't respond that strongly to the virus and some people get a fever and some people get really really sick and some people die so there's a variation on the presentation and so they still have the virus it's just they're not acting sick now i'm going to ask you one of those questions that people get hoot about the children young children most of whom have had all of the vaccinations that we prescribed for little children would that make a difference in they seem to handle this yeah let me put it that way yes i'll explain why even though they don't have a vaccine for the coronavirus what we know is that body's immune system can be more fun can be more effective if you've had other immune responses to other illnesses to other viruses or other bacteria back viruses and so because of this pre-exposure to the vaccines for other other viruses they they will have a stronger immunity and if they encounter other illnesses but i doubt very much all of us have had i don't know why that is the case for the children not getting that ill but but i don't think that's the case but um it's probably i just wanted about vaccination period vaccination period help help a lot and be very foolish for us to think any differently we're very lucky that somebody found stumbled upon you know the case that people do you acquire some immunity when we get vaccinated and that's wonderful because otherwise we'd be going through this every year with different illnesses but now i remember as a child people with polio that you know we're scared that you don't go in the pool in the summer and that um fdr was the first one to talk about polio and so then the vaccine comes along and now we don't see people with polio and i remember as a child uh that what we called whooping cough everybody i know had it and it was years before i could take pepto-bismol because you would cough so much and when it came up it was pink i had nothing to do with pepto-bismol these are childhood memories i remember before vaccinations where everybody got the vaccinations and children were sick bumps measles chickenpox everybody around me as a child me too so you know that's a long time ago as a child but i remember those things and i'm i was delighted that we went through all of my children went through childhood without any of those things because they only had vaccinations so that's why i'm asking yeah most children get vaccination yes they do most children do i'd say 99 to 98 percent of the population in the united states get vaccination but we were lucky that some of these viruses like the virus that causes polio causes immunity and they found a way to give this to safely to humans so that we can prevent polio it's actually it was eradicated to some degree completely off the face of the earth it still pops up in undeveloped countries every now and then but it's officially classified as eradicated that's because of vaccination so hopefully we can have some kind of vaccine that's going to be created for the coronavirus and do the same or humans natural immunity and then nobody's going to see coronavirus ever again it might just run its course this one year or two and then it'll be over oh wouldn't that be wonderful yes and the the worst part i think is the panic i went to go to the shopping center shopping center and the police were actually directing traffic to get into cosco because people were buying toilet paper rice and spam it's ridiculous you know it's it was awesome watching this the hoarding right and wait you haven't had a case yet wait do we get a few cases in oahu which we will and it's going to be crazy i i i just wish the media would stop stirring the pot as much as they are and making it much more worse than it actually is it's bad we need to deal with it but don't make it like the end of the world because it's not the end of the world it's not the end of the world i but i am but i agree with you completely and you know where you see certain stores sell out and other stores there's nobody there and this is just ridiculous yeah well you know i promised you we wouldn't keep you so you can get back to work yeah please thank you i gotta take care of everybody i think they have the coronavirus who has the flu well that's the end of end virus now what what can we say yeah so thank you my dear friend dr t you have always a pleasure spending time with you thank you and again you know tell us exactly where you are we're at the princess kailani ground floor sherryton princess kailani on 120 kailani avenue right next to urban outfitters across from the moana surfrider if you live in the waikiki area call us at 9222112 we'll be happy to pick you up and we are going to start doing online care because we want to help everybody so if people are afraid to get they think they'll get the coronavirus or whatever coming to the office we could actually see you in your home wow tell the medicine this month great then i don't have to drive to see you no just going to press the button on your phone just like this just like this interview we'll say hey marcia how are you doing do you have a fever no you need to refill your medicines yes easy no you know all i can for course my million dollar shot so that's well yeah well but million dollar shot i can't do it online you'll have to come in yes but listen sweetheart thank you so much for spending your time with us and tell doctor where we love you and i will uh we'll see you soon now thank you before the end of the day they will send you a link to the show and you can run it over and over and over again thank you so much thank you marcia thank you all your viewers bye