Dr. Hilary Babcock, Professor of Medicine in the Infectious Diseases division at Washington University School of Medicine joins Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers to discuss the latest coronavirus developments as U.S. hospitalizations reach an all time high.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Let's turn our attention now to the coronavirus pandemic. There are nearly 13.6 million cases in the United States right now, and the death toll has jumped to roughly 269,000 deaths. That's all according to Johns Hopkins University. So let's talk about this and the vaccines that could be available soon with Dr. Hilary Babcock, professor of medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division at Washington University School of Medicine.

So Doctor, I kind of want to start on where we are and where you think we're going to be, what kind of shape we're going to be in the next, I would say, a week and a half or so, especially after this holiday. You know, with the TSA saying on Sunday that they screened over a million passengers-- that's a number that we have not seen since over seven months ago. Where do you think we're going to be two weeks from now?

HILARY BABCOCK: Not in a good place is the short answer. We know that the more that people are out in public and are out together, that the risk of transmitting COVID is higher. Numbers across the country are really high already. And so the fact that so many people were moving around the country and getting together with family is definitely going to increase those numbers. So we have been seeing a pretty rapid rise coming up to Thanksgiving. It may maybe blunted a little bit in the last day or two, but I suspect that's going to continue to rise over the next couple of weeks.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now Pfizer and Biointech have asked for vaccine approval in Europe. They've already asked for that approval here in the United States. I'm wondering if you think that the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, is really fast approaching for the end of this pandemic, not just, of course, here in the United States, but really, globally?

HILARY BABCOCK: So I do think this is really good news that these vaccines are available, that they are coming up for emergency use authorization, that they appear to be so effective. This is all really good news. I do think that it means the light is visible at the end of the tunnel. But I think the end of the tunnel is still a ways off. We do need to get the vaccine into the whole population. We need to get people comfortable with the vaccine and with taking the vaccine, so that we can get the majority of the people in the country vaccinated, and the majority of the people in other countries vaccinated to really be able to contain this spread. So definitely light at the end of the tunnel, but still really months to go before we're really at that point.

So picking up on that, is there a risk that with this virus, that as people are getting vaccinated, that some folks might say, OK, look, the crisis is over. You know, we have frontline workers being vaccinated, we have the elderly being vaccinated. And people who haven't yet received it like the younger people are still going to continue to go out and go to bars and go to restaurants, and they're going to contract and spread it? Or is it really more a sense of there will be herd immunity reached once we get some of those frontline people vaccinated first?

HILARY BABCOCK: So getting those frontline people vaccinated is really important in order to provide protection for them, and to be able to keep their ability to provide care for people who get infected, to be able to keep the economy moving, critical workforce, and the people at highest risk for complications and deaths, should they get COVID. But we really need a Herd immunity level of probably 60% to 70% protected in the population as a whole before we can expect to see significant drops in transmission, and before we can anticipate stopping seeing these clusters of outbreaks that have been occurring across the country.

So I do think there is a risk that people would be, like, yay, we have a vaccine, everything goes back to normal tomorrow. It'll be a more gradual process and we'll be able to track case numbers. And as these numbers go down, we can begin to start opening things back up and restarting some of the things that we have given up during this year.

KRISTIN MYERS: I only have about 30 seconds left with you, Doctor, but I really want to ask you picking up on that herd immunity piece, how long-- if we start rolling out this vaccine as soon as the end of this month, how long before we hit that 60% to 70% of herd immunity?

HILARY BABCOCK: There are still some unanswered questions that make that hard to answer. So we don't know exactly how many doses will be available, how quickly, and what the distribution capacity is. The problems with our public health infrastructure will continue to make it difficult to get the vaccine out promptly and quickly to all of the people we want to give it to, even when there are doses available. But I think that by the end of 2021, we should be in hopefully a pretty good place. And we should have a sense of how well it's all going by the summer of next year.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, hopefully end a 2021. We're going to try to hold you to that. Dr. Hilary Babcock, professor of medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division at the Washington University School of Medicine. Thanks for joining us today.

HILARY BABCOCK: Thank you.