You can read a transcript from the interview here:
Sumit Oberoi: Welcome, everybody. There's a lot of uncertainty in relation to COVID-19, and a lot of information, so it can be difficult to know what sources to trust. I'd like to welcome you all this afternoon. My name is Sumit Oberoi. I'm executive director of AMCA, Air Conditioning & Mechanical Contractors' Association.
Sumit Oberoi: With me today, I would like to give a very warm welcome to Professor Doherty, who is going to be involved [00:00:30] in a question-and-answer session with us. Professor Doherty is a globally recognized epidemiologist who, in 1996, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine for his discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells.
Sumit Oberoi: Peter, a very warm welcome, and thank you for joining me today.
Professor Peter...: Well, thanks, Sumit. It's great to be here. I'm more an immunologist than an epidemiologist, but it doesn't matter for this. [00:01:00] I study immunity. Epidemiologists tend to be highly mathematical guys who make all sorts of models and projections. We sometimes lose them to the banks, where they do the same thing.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, well, I'll try not to get too technical on you today.
Professor Peter...: No, that's all right. It's fine.
Sumit Oberoi: Essentially, Peter, can you please give us a current status of the virus in Australia?
Professor Peter...: Well, at the moment, we're not seeing many cases and it looks very encouraging, [00:01:30] but we need to be testing more broadly than we have been doing. In Victoria, it was announced several days ago that we would now test anybody who had a fever and a respiratory-type infection. My understanding is that the numbers of people turning up to be tested have increased a lot, so we'll see within a few days whether the numbers of [00:02:00] positive cases go up, because what we lack is information on how much is out there in the community. At the moment, it looks low because we're not admitting people who are sick, and so that's really good and that's encouraging. On the other hand, there could be a lot of people, or some people, being infected but not showing symptoms.
Sumit Oberoi: Okay. Would you say, is that more so [00:02:30] in the Victorian context versus the other states, or we're seeing a real unified approach to how we're going about that in terms of the testing?
Professor Peter...: I think we're the first to open up and test more broadly, but I suspect as this goes on...
Professor Peter...: I'm just going to turn off Outlook. It's dinging. Yeah, okay.
Professor Peter...: As this goes on, and if we keep the numbers low, I expect we'll see that extend across [00:03:00] the country, really, because we really have to test more broadly and make sure there's none out there. The real hope is that we can actually go to a stage where we open up because we don't have evidence of infection in the country. That would be fantastic. We might be wanting to test some of you guys because you're out there working, and so you're more exposed than a lot of us who are at home.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, I guess [00:03:30] there's a bit of a mix there, Peter. We've got the construction side, which I guess from an economic perspective there's been a real coming together of the industry to keep the construction industry operating and social distancing and also building good discussion around guidelines and things like that. That's real positive. Then I guess the other side of our industry is the service-based industry that is really essential to make sure that the buildings are still [00:04:00] operating and they're essentially maintained and things like that, which we'll talk about as we go on.
Sumit Oberoi: Peter, while we're talking in the context of Australia, I think it would be also good to talk about what you're seeing from other countries. Is anyone doing something better than what we're doing in Australia, or is there aspects that we could consider with our policy processes and the way we really get to the issues?
Professor Peter...: [00:04:30] Well, probably the country that's doing best is New Zealand, because it's small, it's an island like us, and they closed up really early. But we're doing extremely well for a country of this size, and our processes have worked, it seems. We made a few mistakes early on, but we seem to have got away with it, which is great. We're the lucky country, so we sometimes turn out a bit better than we should [00:05:00] be.
Professor Peter...: Basically, government has been right across it, and they've been doing the right thing. They're listening to the chief medical officer, who, in turn, is being advised through committees that are comprised of people like people from our institute, and particularly the epidemiologists, in fact, who are the ones that study disease through the community. They're also being advised by economists and sociologists and all those people, too, [00:05:30] because there are enormous implications in this whole thing, as we all understand.
Professor Peter...: Yes, we've been doing well. We can be proud of ourselves. I think the only country that might be doing even a little bit better is New Zealand.
Sumit Oberoi: Peter, just as an extension to the government policy work, I note that you're a patron of the Doherty Institute, and the modeling that's really informing government policies' response to [00:06:00] the COVID-19 has been carried out by the Doherty Institute. Can you provide us with a bit of an overview of that work?
Professor Peter...: The modeling work. Well, the modeling work is... Our lead epidemiologist is a pediatrician, a woman doctor called Jodie McVernon, who retrained herself as an epidemiologist. She's one of the prominent people on the national committees, but she's working with a whole lot of other epidemiologists from different [00:06:30] institutions and from within the University of Melbourne.
Professor Peter...: The institute itself is basically a laboratory. We do lab tests, and we're setting up all sorts of stuff to make vaccines and test vaccines, and test the tests that are going out there to see whether the virus is in the community, and all that sort of stuff. We're basically a lab, but we have that arm through, in fact, our influenza center which takes [00:07:00] us into epidemiology.
Professor Peter...: Also, we're unusual for research institutes in that we also have the hospital doctors who do the healthcare and are on the wards at Royal Melbourne Hospital in infectious disease. If they have lab-based activities, then they're in our building. We're a mix of people from all sorts of different areas of medicine and science who are all talking to each other about this problem and working with each other, so it's a powerful [00:07:30] institution.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, and so I assume a fair bit of collaboration and sharing some of the applied learnings that are in the field to apply them both in the research space but also what's happening at the front line, I think that would certainly enrich the process that you're dealing with.
Professor Peter...: Exactly. That's what's going on. There's a lot of collaboration across the thing. You know from your own area, though everyone may be in a broad area, [00:08:00] say, construction, you've got all sorts of subspecialties there. Their language can be a bit different. Their culture can be a bit different.
Professor Peter...: The same is true in medicine. We have different languages around some of the systems we study. For instance, the virologists, they study the virus. The immunologists, they study the immune response. Then, of course, the infectious disease physicians, they study the infection in people and deal [00:08:30] with the clinical consequences. All of them are a bit different. We're not right across... No single person is right across everything.
Sumit Oberoi: Assuming those three camps that you spoke about, do they have a different view in policy discussions whether we should go eradication or herd immunity?
Professor Peter...: Yeah, we're not talking at that level. We're talking about the disease. That's what my field is. I'm interested in an area which you call pathogenesis. [00:09:00] That's the way disease works. We're basically down there at the hospital research institute laboratory bench level making everything work. We're the workers.
Professor Peter...: Now, the guys that are talking policy are further up the scale. Our director, Sharon Lewin, who's a very eminent HIV/AIDS specialist who's had a lot of experience with the AIDS community, lot of experience with [00:09:30] developing drug trials, vaccine trials, and so forth, very smart woman, she's very much in the policy area as well.
Professor Peter...: Most of us are down there at the lab level, and we talk. Three mornings a week, we have a meeting on Zoom from 8:30 to 9:30 or so, and we talk about everything that's going on. There'll be physicians on that. There'll be epidemiology, [00:10:00] virology, immunology, all across the spectrum, all talking together.
Sumit Oberoi: Do you also include patients in that discussion?
Professor Peter...: No, we're not-
Sumit Oberoi: No, it's more just a-
Professor Peter...: ... including patients. Actually, at the moment, there are relatively few patients, quite frankly. No, the patient contact is with the doctors and the nurses. We're not the people who are involved in clinical care.
Professor Peter...: Of course, anything that's done with patients [00:10:30] from the research side, which is, say, sampling blood to see what the immune response is really like... because this is a brand new virus. We've never seen it before, and it's different, very different from influenza, even different from SARS that went before. Anything that's done, though, with patients is done on what we call informed consent with the physicians, even just taking blood for research purposes. Mostly, people who've got a thing like this are really keen [00:11:00] to collaborate and help us understand.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. I think just picking up on some earlier discussion I mentioned about the industries, that really we're taking it quite serious around the social distancing, and I've heard figures that when social distancing is observed by 70% of the population, there's not much impact on the rates of cases, but at 80% to 90% of the population, we have really a chance of eradicating the virus. [00:11:30] Can you comment on these sort of actions and what it means for government policy and social distancing measures that we should-
Professor Peter...: Well, we've had strong social distancing policies, but on the other hand, there are people like your people who are still out there and working and things have been going. We could go to a different level where we shut down everything, but I don't think there's any obvious need to [00:12:00] do that at this stage. I don't think the government will be doing that.
Professor Peter...: It's far too soon to start thinking of relaxing controls, but if we can test broadly in the community and we find that we're not seeing evidence in infection, particularly in people like you guys who are out there a bit, and in the people who are involved in food services, the hospital people themselves, and so forth, if we're not seeing any infection in those people, then it may come to [00:12:30] the point where they're starting to relax things. I think that'll be a while off yet, but it might not be months. It might be a month or so, or more. Who knows? It depends what we find. It's a big experiment.
Sumit Oberoi: It is.
Professor Peter...: We're doing a pretty good experiment, and say, America is doing a horrible experiment because they have enormous numbers of people dying, and their political leadership at the federal level is dreadful, of course.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, [00:13:00] it is a scary situation at the moment in the U.S. Yeah, it's quite confronting when we see that on the news.
Sumit Oberoi: Let's just get back, can we talk about the virus again? I think most of us... I think the Australian public are becoming more educated and aware of the nature of the virus as a result of COVID-19, but could you really provide us with a little primer on what a virus is and how it perpetuates?
Professor Peter...: Yeah. Well, [00:13:30] I'm writing little bits that are for a very general audience on our website. If you go to our website and you go to the news section, I've put two of them up so far. It'll talk very generally at the sort of level you want to talk at now.
Professor Peter...: Okay, so a virus is basically... We have a debate about whether it's living or nonliving. It doesn't matter. It's a sort of silly debate. Basically, it's a bit of genetic material that's got some protein [00:14:00] and fat wrapped around it, lipid, to protect the genetic material, that has some mechanism for getting into cells. It gets into cells, and it can only grow within living cells.
Professor Peter...: SARS-CoV-2 is actually the name of the virus. COVID-19 is the disease. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that we think normally grows in bats, but it's jumped across into us and it can get into our cells. [00:14:30] It doesn't grow outside the body. Bacteria grow outside the body, but viruses don't. I
Professor Peter...: t's what we call an obligate intracellular parasite, if you like. It has to get into our cells, turn off some of the genetic mechanisms in the cell that might get rid of it, and take over other bits of the genetics of the cell so it can grow and multiply. Then one virus particle will get into [00:15:00] a cell and a million will come out, and that infects more cells and more cells and more cells. Then what stops that is the immune response, which gradually turns on and takes control. That's why people get better.
Sumit Oberoi: As an extension to that, Peter, can you tell us a bit about the background of this virus and what makes this virus so different?
Professor Peter...: Well, it's a virus that we've never seen before, of course, and it's been growing in bats. It seems [00:15:30] to be a virus that persists in bats, and we're beginning to understand the bat immune system is very different from ours. When it jumps into us, it's in a very different situation, and some of the problems we're seeing, we think, reflect that history. We're still unpicking just how exactly that immune response works.
Professor Peter...: We know it works broadly along the usual principles of any virus-specific response, but [00:16:00] there are also aspects to this virus that are different that are causing some problems, particularly in late-stage disease, that we don't normally see with other viruses. It's not influenza. It doesn't look like influenza. We thought initially it did, but the more we know about it, the more different it is.
Sumit Oberoi: Each region in the winter, whether it's the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, will have a strong influenza season, so the [00:16:30] proposition of influenza seasons connecting from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere at the same time is something that we rarely see, right, at that level?
Professor Peter...: Well, the thing is, basically, that with us all so locked down, we're going to see less influenza, because influenza spreads in much the same way, by coughing and sneezing and droplet and hand to face. Influenza [00:17:00] is going to be much less of a problem this year as long as we're all locked away, but everyone is advised to get their influenza vaccine because you wouldn't want to get one infection and then the other, because they do damage the same sorts of cells. Though the infections are rather different, they're both damaging the lung, and the lung is a pretty sensitive organ.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, and I think that's really good. Thank you for sharing that, because as we are [00:17:30] going to get into some of the colder months, we are getting into the flu season, so I think it's important that we consider that, because of the implications of potentially being exposed to both situations.
Sumit Oberoi: Is there any sort of other things you could touch on around viruses? I tend to follow what's happening in other parts of the world, whether there's measles outbreaks in Africa, and Ebola, and things like this. [00:18:00] What other sort of strategies have been... I know the World Heath Organization does a huge body of work with great leaders around the world to really get to these things, but is there anything that we should be taking some of the learnings from those regions in dealing with this?
Professor Peter...: Well, everything is based on prior experience and so forth. Measles, for instance, is an incredibly infectious virus. [00:18:30] We think it's more infectious than the COVID-19. We think COVID-19 is somewhere about as infectious as flu, maybe a bit more infectious, but measles is much more infectious, again.
Professor Peter...: We think that with COVID-19, if we get to about 60% of people who've been infected, we'll get a big herd immunity effect and you'll start to see a lot less cases. A lot of [00:19:00] people will have had it, then won't get it again. There'll be just people transmitting. We think that'll be about 60%, but we don't really know because it's a brand new infection. We're all a learning curve with it.
Professor Peter...: But the experience of other... For instance, Ebola is a horrific disease, but I was never worried about it being a problem in our country or in the United States because it's something that gets picked up early and people just shut it down. This one [00:19:30] is more difficult, and the reason it's much more difficult is that quite a number of people get very mild symptoms or even no symptoms, but they can still transmit.
Sumit Oberoi: Is it the asymptomatic sort of thing that someone might have it within that 14-day period but not really demonstrate the-
Professor Peter...: Absolutely. The only way it can be totally sure that they don't have the infection is to test them as negative, and [00:20:00] at the moment... The tests are being developed at the moment. When you make an immune response to a virus, one of the things that happens is you make antibodies, and those antibodies stick around in the blood for years. They help to bring the infection to an end. There are also other mechanisms that do that. But they float around in the blood for years, and they're the protection against reinfection.
Professor Peter...: Now, another thing we need to do [00:20:30] is to test for the numbers of people in the community who have antibodies. What we lack at the moment is a very good-
Sumit Oberoi: How would we go about doing that? That would be-
Professor Peter...: You can do it by taking a blood sample. Say you're going to do a blood donation-
Sumit Oberoi: Or donating blood. Yeah, or donating blood.
Professor Peter...: Say you're going to do a blood donation. One of the things we could do is to get everyone to agree that when you do a blood donation, we can test your serum for antibodies. Now, that's pretty cumbersome [00:21:00] if you're going to test 100,000 people, sticking a needle in their arm, so what we need is a test where you just prick the thumb, you take a drop of blood, and you test it on a very quick assay system. Now, those tests are currently being developed. I believe some of them look very promising; some of them look not so great.
Professor Peter...: Once we have that, you could do a broad antibody survey. At the moment, in Australia, the big point in doing that, [00:21:30] because we think we've had relatively little infection, but it would be a good thing to do in the United States and in Europe, where they've had a lot of infection, because that would tell them what the total rate of infection is and you'd pick up all those people who were missed because they didn't have symptoms.
Sumit Oberoi: Okay. I wanted to change the focus now to viruses and buildings because, as you know, our members provide [00:22:00] the heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems both in the construction services and also service and maintenance. What I wanted to discuss was tell us a little bit about the airborne nature of viruses.
Professor Peter...: Normally, we don't worry about viruses like flu and so forth distributed through standard air conditioning-type systems. I don't think that's a major concern. [00:22:30] You do have some filters on those things, but they're mainly dust filters, aren't they?
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah.
Professor Peter...: Yeah. Of course, in our building, where we can handle viruses up to the level of Ebola-
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. Is it a PC4 lab-
Professor Peter...: We have negative pressure air, and it goes through big HEPA filters that will take out viruses. That's not feasible for most buildings and not necessary. The general message with influenza [00:23:00] has been... Say you're on a plane. Firstly, we don't think the virus gets around through the plane air conditioning or air circulation system, but we do think that if you're in two or three seats, either forward, backward, or to the side of someone with flu, you're at risk, and particularly if you're in an aisle seat you're at greater risk.
Professor Peter...: It's kind of the distances we're talking about now with [00:23:30] COVID-19, a couple of meters. That's coughing, spluttering droplets. The droplets are about... You probably know this stuff better than I do, but I think they're about five or six microns down to about three, two, even one micron. If you're just coughing and spluttering six-micron droplets, the masks will take them out pretty effectively. Even a cloth mask will do a reasonable job, with finely woven cloth. But down [00:24:00] to one micron, then you really need the N95 masks or better.
Professor Peter...: Now, what we're seeing is, not here, but in the United States and Europe where they've got a lot of cases, is that doctors are particularly at risk, especially what we call intensivists, the guys who were working with very sick patients and trying to put tubes down their throat to help them breathe. They're getting a lot of small [00:24:30] droplets.
Sumit Oberoi: Okay, so would you say they're probably the most exposed in the-
Professor Peter...: They're the most exposed, yeah, the doctors and nurses who are intubating people, putting a tube down their trachea. Because people are very sick, they're coughing, they're spluttering, there's a lot of mucus, there's a lot of droplets, and because they're very close, they're being hit by small droplets. Whereas a big droplet, if you cough, may go 1.5 meters [00:25:00] or so, a small droplet will fall to the ground much quicker. But if you're up really close, you're getting those. I think we've seen a lot of very severe disease and deaths in healthcare workers.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, I was talking to someone the other day, Peter, too, that with the amount of cleaning that's going on in hospitals at the moment, that you're actually seeing a reduction in other things that are-
Professor Peter...: Yeah, that would be right.
Sumit Oberoi: ... ordinarily the case. I don't know, I'm not technically putting this out there, but-
Professor Peter...: We [00:25:30] have a problem in-
Sumit Oberoi: ... golden staph and things like that-
Professor Peter...: Yeah, we have the golden staph, MRSA, resistant staphylococcus aureus. You get outbreaks of this in hospitals. It's bacterial, so it's much bigger. Everyone rushes around when you get an outbreak, and they do hand sanitizing. They wipe everything down. They're all very careful. Outbreak is under control, people keep doing that for a few weeks, and then they forget. Everyone is human. That's [00:26:00] what's happening now. We're behaving as though that's going on, so you'll see a drop in other infections. It's also because, of course, hospitals are not particularly crowded at the moment because we kind of emptied them out so we could deal with COVID-19. But at the moment, it seems very little of that space is being used.
Sumit Oberoi: Okay. In our industry, indoor air quality is being spoken about with increased importance as we learn about [00:26:30] how it relates to health and general well-being of building occupants, and has even been linked to the productivity. Can you talk a little bit about the quality of indoor air quality to public health, in particular, viruses and other airborne pathogens?
Professor Peter...: Yeah. Well, any understanding of that I have is pretty peripheral, really, but just as we had said, I don't think viruses get around normally in normal air conditioning systems, though if we [00:27:00] got something dangerous, we certainly exclude it. Generally, air quality, it's not my area. You'd need to talk to a respiratory physician or something.
Professor Peter...: I think we're all better off if we don't have a lot of crap in our lungs. That's pretty obvious. But it always seems to me extremely interesting that New York City, which must have not particularly great air quality, you'd think, a lot of people I know who live in New [00:27:30] York City all their life live to be more than 100. I think the fact of it is they walk a lot.
Professor Peter...: Clearly, we want decent air quality, and you don't want nasty things in the air, particularly things like lead dust. In some of the mining areas, at times, there have been high levels of lead, and that can do a lot of damage, especially to small children in the stage their brains are developing. You need decent air quality, [00:28:00] building air quality. Obviously, we all enjoy having good air.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. You touched on the message about how things get transmitted as well. I guess the challenges we also have is the education piece around what sort of information we should provide to our clients when we're maintaining and doing our service work in buildings. [00:28:30] I think that's something that's pretty important to dispel some of the things and the concerns. I think that's something that-
Professor Peter...: Yeah, this would be a start for you. If you're concerned about health implications, you'd really need to talk to a respiratory physician or someone like that. That's not my kind of expertise at all. Anything I'd say would be just the common sense things we all think are true and hope are true.
Sumit Oberoi: [00:29:00] Yeah. Peter, you talked about airplanes before. What about the cruise ships, the experience there?
Professor Peter...: The cruise ships, I haven't really followed it that closely, but I have the impression that most of the contamination on the cruise ships was by handling contaminated food trays and utensils. [00:29:30] On the original one, I think, the Princess, a number of people were... Diamond Princess, was it?
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, Diamond Princess.
Professor Peter...: A number of the crew members were infected. They were transmitting it through the food trays. The virus will survive on cardboard for up to an absolute maximum of 24 hours. I think on plastics it can survive three days or more. [00:30:00] On glass, I don't know how long. It'll survive on steel for three days or more. In the SARS outbreak earlier, which is a very similar virus, they were wiping down elevator buttons and all that sort of stuff.
Professor Peter...: I think a lot of the infection on cruise ships was actually, initially at least, from crew members. And as I also recall vaguely from the Diamond Princess, the original one that landed up in Japan, once they [00:30:30] did impose proper quarantine regulations, and that was after about 600 or 700 people had been infected out of about 3,000, but once they did put in proper quarantine regulations, the numbers and cases dropped right off. I think you can be safe on a cruise ship, but it has to operate optimally, and you have to know who's infected and get them out of the system, your crew members.
Sumit Oberoi: And potentially challenging some of the operating systems [00:31:00] internally of how they-
Professor Peter...: I don't know how much it was got around by the air handling system. I think probably not. I think most of it was probably hand contamination or exposure to infected crew members, but I don't know. People will be looking very closely at that. You would know if it got around in the air handling system because everyone would get it, wouldn't they, or everyone on a particular air distribution network or whatever?
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. [00:31:30] The potential implications of the future of how we design buildings is something that I'm interested in. Do you have any thoughts on what we might need to consider in the future?
Professor Peter...: Well, only the things we probably all noticed. It's much better, if you think a door handle is contaminated, to have a lever door handle than a round knob. [00:32:00] You can operate a lever door handle with your finger. If you've got a round knob, you've got to grab hold of it and turn it. I'd get rid of all those round-knob door handles for a start. Otherwise, no particular insights, I think-
Sumit Oberoi: Probably as more of a broader question, do you think there might be implications in the way in which tenants move back into the buildings? [00:32:30] We think of the major corporates in CBD, Melbourne, Sydney, or wherever, and we'll have to come back, of course, to support their businesses. They're doing a fantastic job working from home at the moment and balancing family and work, but getting back in there, is there any sort of consideration in terms of as we move to-
Professor Peter...: If you don't have any evidence that anyone in that building was infected, [00:33:00] or if it goes back weeks or even more than a week, so if you don't have any evidence that anyone working there was infected and those people have been out of the building, I would think there's no extraordinary measures needed before they come back in. The virus is not going to survive forever on surfaces. I think the longest I've heard is someone suggested nine days on steel, but I think it's probably more like three days at the most. [00:33:30] You could wipe down all those surfaces that people normally touch, like elevator buttons or door handles, but honestly I don't think there'll be much risk and no extraordinary cleaning needed for buildings, really. The public health people would advise you on that. That's their area.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. I guess, Peter, where I'd like to discuss with you now is, what does the future hold? [00:34:00] With Australia making good progresses we spoke about earlier towards flattening the curve, we're beginning to hear people talk about relaxing the social distancing measures. What are your thoughts?
Professor Peter...: I think that's a policy matter, and there's a whole lot of people thinking about this right across the spectrum. They're linked by very sophisticated network organizations and decision-making processes, so [00:34:30] that's way above my pay grade, basically.
Professor Peter...: Just generally thinking about it in terms of common sense, I think if we can get to the stage... Obviously, if we can get to the stage where we think we just don't have any virus around the place, we could return to pretty much normal internal activity in Australia. We just have to keep our borders closed. That would be the optimal. If we could do that, at least you would get the whole economic activity [00:35:00] that's home based up and running.
Professor Peter...: And maybe we could start to make a few of the transitions I think we need to make. It's pretty obvious now, and I hope that we're going to follow up on this, that we don't manufacture enough in our country, that we're too reliant on other countries, and I think we really need to start changing that and change back to a situation where we have a lot more going on here and we're not so dependent on others, because it's very clear at times that we're at the end of supply chains, [00:35:30] and that's a problem. But other than that-
Sumit Oberoi: I think where I'm coming from is, how do we rebound post-COVID-19? Even in construction, we've got very traditional means of the way in which we procure and we deliver projects, but there could be some smarts that we can embed in now to-
Professor Peter...: Well, look, construction is hardly my industry, hardly something I know much about, but I did hear a very good talk [00:36:00] recently by a guy from MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world's greatest universities, and also a very technologically oriented university. They patent an enormous amount of stuff. They spin out enormous numbers of new companies. This guy was talking about nuclear power, and he's saying that there are plans afoot that they could well go to substantially using nuclear power in Boston, which is where MIT [00:36:30] is, because, of course, it's clean energy in the sense of climate change.
Professor Peter...: He was talking about why it is that China can roll out, say, nuclear plants much cheaper than the United States, and he said the reason is it's all under one administration. They all work on one standard platform and set of protocols. If you build one in one place, you do exactly the same thing in another. That works. What happens so much [00:37:00] so in the United States is it's like you're reinventing the wheel every time you do one of these things. It's a new project, and it costs an enormous amount of money and has enormous inefficiency.
Professor Peter...: Another thing he was pointing out, that rather than build a big power plant, a massive one that takes years to build, they're developing in various places what they call small modular reactors. Now, these are smaller, but what you do, instead of building one big one, is you build multiple [00:37:30] little ones at the same place. He said if you do that, after you build the first one, every subsequent one, the cost will fall.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. I guess that's where some of the thinking that I'm coming from here, is around what we call industrialized construction, the ability to go broader than prefabrication and modularization. It's really building off those smarts around the standard platform you were talking about and helping deliver higher-performing [00:38:00] buildings. I think that's really the future that we're talking about.
Professor Peter...: I guess if you watch these programs on TV on house construction, which I'm a bit over now because there are so many of them, but really you can see how some of these modular constructions they're using, say, for houses in Germany, particularly, are extraordinary. You can put up a house in no time flat and have everything done at headquarters very efficiently. [00:38:30] We're still building houses the way we've always built them, as far as I can see, and it's not an efficient process, and also extraordinarily slow.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. Well, I think that's the reason why we wanted to interview you today, was to get different perspectives into our industry, because the collaboration piece that you were talking about earlier amongst your colleagues from different fields, that's pretty much where I think a lot of industries need to go to [00:39:00] find a new way of dealing with-
Professor Peter...: Very different in the sciences. Well, for instance, we're not... I don't know whether different unions are a problem still, but basically the whole of the science enterprise has always been highly collaborative. We do compete with each other, but when push comes to shove, everyone gets together and collaborates and works together. That's always been our culture.
Professor Peter...: It's an internationally collaborative culture as well. For [00:39:30] instance, I was thinking that the Australian COVID-19 vaccine that's being developed at the University of Queensland, I thought it was being tested at CSIRO in Geelong, the AAHL laboratory, the big animal health lab, which is a very high-security lab. If you're interested in air handling, you ought to have a look at that. It's extraordinary.
Professor Peter...: But in fact, the Australian vaccines are being tested in [00:40:00] the Netherlands. We're testing two from somewhere else across the planet because that's all being coordinated through an international organization called CEPI, a privately funded organization, some government funding, that's been getting ready for a new pandemic and developing the platform technologies for new vaccines. We're working right across the planet. Wherever resources are available, we're collaborating with them. If we [00:40:30] get a vaccine here at some point, it'll have to be tested in monkeys.
Sumit Oberoi: What's the lead time to go to market after testing?
Professor Peter...: Well, the shortest you could get, I think, would be to get a vaccine out there early next year. If everything went well and everything was very safe, you could get the product as well.
Sumit Oberoi: Is that just a regulatory approach to make sure-
Professor Peter...: It's actually more about safety. There are some concerns with this virus that suggest [00:41:00] there could be unusual safety issues, and that's from earlier work with SARS and also what we're learning a bit with this virus. We're concerned about that safety issue.
Professor Peter...: Now, because of a vaccine goes into large numbers of normal people, and large numbers of people don't get a severe infection with this thing, then we have to be incredibly sure that it's safe. That's the problem. It's just safety. It's not that there's anyone holding [00:41:30] it up through red tape or anything. It's just you have to do it the right way and test it properly. We couldn't-
Sumit Oberoi: What are your thoughts on... We really, as a community, as, I guess, a cultural thing, we need to get our confidence back, too, post-COVID. I know a number of people have been through a hard time in a whole range of different things in life. There's always challenges [00:42:00] in front of us. As a community, how do we build that confidence back then?
Professor Peter...: Well, I would think if we're able to get out of the lockdown phase reasonably early, considering the amount of money the government has committed, maybe they can switch some of that into doing what was done at the time of the GFC.
Sumit Oberoi: Get the pubs open again.
Professor Peter...: Get the pubs open again. Get construction going again. Maybe [00:42:30] get some new local industries going and start to reduce our dependence on-
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, I think the government has done a pretty good job with the stimulus packages, but I think what they could do is consider some other ways of innovation where they could potentially do some seed funding around that to get businesses to get that supply chain or invent a new supply chain in the county. I think that would be a good way.
Professor Peter...: I think it's up to you guys from [00:43:00] the industries to try and suggest things to them. They've being pretty good. I'm very impressed. Dan Tehan, for instance, has put some stuff out there about starting to educate more people in the trades and the sciences, so he's interesting. I think it's not an enormous amount of money, less than 100 million or something, but it's still money. I think if [00:43:30] people come in with good ideas, maybe you'll get a hearing from this. The great need will be to get people back to work and get a dynamic economy running again.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, and an economy that-
Professor Peter...: Obviously, all of us want that to happen, but for the moment, the main thing is for everyone to stay locked down so we can get this virus cleared out of the place. If we can do that, then we can go back to work.
Sumit Oberoi: [00:44:00] Yeah. Look, I think that's the future, as you were saying. Let's get the economy firing again. Let's get the confidence back with everyone.
Professor Peter...: Yeah. Well, I'm not a specialist in any of these things, so I'm just talking just the same way any of us would. You can listen to me on labs and stuff, and I know a bit more than most, but anything other than that, it's just a general discussion about [00:44:30] how we might do things. But I would like to see us...
Professor Peter...: During the Second World War, we made planes here. We made the Beaufighter, the Beaufort. We made tanks. We did all sorts of things. I think at the beginning of the Second World War, we had the capacity [00:45:00] to equip five army divisions. We don't have much of that capacity left at all. There were machine shops... We built, I think, something like 60 corvettes all with steam engines that were made in railway workshops. All that is gone. I don't think you can put that back, but we could put some more manufacturing back into the system, I think, maybe differently. Maybe a lot of it would be 3D printing, [00:45:30] for instance. Why import parts if we can print them?
Sumit Oberoi: Is there anything you can see in the medical field at the moment that we could certainly lead the charge in expertise?
Professor Peter...: We have one of the biggest medical... We have the biggest blood products company in the world, actually, CSL, though not all of that goes on in Australia. I think there are things I can see in the medical area that might be enhanced, and I'm going to be talking about those with colleagues and stuff. [00:46:00] I think our capacity to grow up a lot of stuff for vaccine and things like that, maybe that needs to be enhanced.
Professor Peter...: Medically, we're fairly sophisticated, but as you can see at the moment, I think there's been programs on... We're actually using 3D printing, and we've dragged ResMed, the sleep apnea company, into making ventilators. There is some stuff we can adapt, [00:46:30] but I think we should be thinking a lot more about this sort of thing. I think a country that doesn't manufacture is basically in trouble.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. In terms of the healthcare system going more and more digital, do you see that happening more and more?
Professor Peter...: That's kind of out of my area, but that's been happening for years, with some really spectacular disasters. You're probably familiar with that. Everything is being rapidly digitized. The question there, of [00:47:00] course, is a lot of issues around privacy and so forth.
Professor Peter...: One of the things we're going to be doing after this is over is an enormous amount of genomics. Basically, we'll be looking at people who've been infected and have survived or had different outcomes, and we'll be seeing if there's any differences in their genomes, because we can sequence human genomes very easily now. An enormous amount of information is going to come out of this. It's transforming the way we are thinking.
Professor Peter...: I wrote a book about [00:47:30] pandemics a few years back. You can actually see it behind me on the thing there with the blue. A lot of things I just didn't even think about that I now realize are important.
Sumit Oberoi: With some of those things, is there anything that's probably growing a bit more obvious now when you reflect on that book?
Professor Peter...: Yeah. Well, all the issues for labor and work and all those sort of things. At [00:48:00] the time of the swine flu, at the time of the bird flu scare back in 2005, there were a lot of pandemic plans prepared. Australia had a pretty good pandemic plan, fortunately, that went back to that, I think, and we had a lot of committees and so forth that were all set up. We actually responded very professionally and very well at the professional level, the medical, public health, and all the rest of it. I think the country has been enormously [00:48:30] benefited by the fact the politicians share the same vision, and the prime minister down through the various state premiers have all been on the same page. They disagree a bit on things like opening schools, but it's coming.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, I think it is, in many respects, that you've seen quite unified views, moving away from ideological views, because it's a public health issue. Let's not argue [00:49:00] about some of the semantics. Let's try and build a coalition of support and a program to deal with these things.
Professor Peter...: I was worried about... I've lived a lot in the United States, spent a lot of my career in the United States, so I was worried that we were going down the same crazy neoliberal path and libertarian path the Americans have followed, where, for instance, a state governor will say, "Well, it's not my job to close down the state. It's up to individual liberty to [00:49:30] determine whether you're going to do that or not." Well, that's catastrophic, and a lot of people will die as a result of that sort of attitude.
Professor Peter...: What I've found is the old Australia is still there. Our tradition, our culture, we had some of the first labor unions in the world. We had some of the first labor governments in the world. It's always been there in the social mix, whether we have a right or a left-wing government. There's always that sense you have to, [00:50:00] to some extent, look after everybody. Now, I was worrying that that had been terribly eroded and we no longer thought that way. I think the fact that a right-wing government has come to the party and pretty much done the right thing is impressive, and I'm very pleased with that. I feel much more comfortable.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. Well, you speak to any business, and the business leader, they'll say the people make the business. It's not much of a business without-
Professor Peter...: No. So [00:50:30] much of the American model is basically simply resulting in the rich getting richer all the time and the poor getting poorer. It's catastrophic. And of course, their public health system is catastrophic. We have a very good public health system, really. Public health systems are a problem now, our medical system, because they're very expensive, and there's more expense loaded on them all the time with very expensive drugs. But in actual fact, the Australian system is good. It's robust, and it's serving us well.
Sumit Oberoi: [00:51:00] Yeah. Well, Peter, that's probably the extent of our quick Q&A today with the AMCA. We really appreciate you giving up your time. I know you've got a lot of commitments in terms of providing and sharing your insight and the great work that you being a patron of the Doherty Institute-
Professor Peter...: Basically, now that we've had a discussion, [00:51:30] if we get to the stage where we want to test the construction industry to see what's happening, I know the right person to contact.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, well, we can try. We can certainly try to do the introduction. But I'm interested, Peter, that book that you mentioned in the back, the pandemic one with blue at the back, are you thinking about another extension of that book?
Professor Peter...: I don't know whether I'm going to redo [00:52:00] that book. There's a lot of really sound basic stuff in that if you want to read up on it. You can get it as an ebook, and-
Sumit Oberoi: I'm just thinking more, would something that connects to the-
Professor Peter...: No, if you were going to revise that-
Sumit Oberoi: But something that connects to the economic situation? Because you mentioned-
Professor Peter...: Probably the right person to write that would be someone else. It's a Q&A book. It's called Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know. It's basically part of a series that one of the publishers did. It's [00:52:30] just question-and-answer, so it's a really simple format. I probably won't redo it. I'm not sure. But I'm writing another book as I go through this, of the experience of living through this. Hopefully, if I'm still around when it's over, that'll come out. I thought I was retiring. I'm 79 years old.
Sumit Oberoi: No, [00:53:00] no, no, you-
Professor Peter...: I've just written my retirement book, which is on war and tennis.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, well, thanks a lot. As you said earlier, we are currently learning about the virus, how it affects the population, how we treat it, how to test for it, how we get new data every day. In other words, we are collectively living through a scientific experiment.
Professor Peter...: In a way, and there are different experiments. There's our experiment, which so far is [00:53:30] a very good one. There's the American experiment, which is, so far, terrible, and they're doing different experiments in different states. And there's the European experiment, which isn't great either. Now, Italy and Spain and Britain are having a terrible time. France, a bit in the middle. Germany, doing rather better, but I think they have a lot of hospital resource and they're getting people into hospital very quickly, as I understand it. [00:54:00] It's a big experiment with a totally new and dangerous virus, and we'll learn a tremendous amount from this because our technology now and the capacity to look back on things like genomics and stuff is just so extraordinary. We will get an enormous amount of information from this.
Sumit Oberoi: The availability of the data coming out every day in front of everyone, I think that's certainly changing the [00:54:30] way in which we're thinking. It's front and center. We're seeing the premier get up and be able to communicate intelligently about the issue, same with the prime minister. It's really enriching the process to have that real live-
Professor Peter...: Well, I think we need a lot more... I'd like to see a lot more on our media, basically, hearing from people who actually know something, rather than journalists and opinion writers. I'm thinking about that generally. I'd like to be hearing [00:55:00] more from engineers and less from people who have opinions about engineering, quite frankly. It might be a bit much to hear from engineers. They can be a bit inarticulate, but-
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah. This is part of the reason why I reached out to you, Peter, was to have a chat, because we represent a part of the industry which do amazing work. We're involved in constructing the [00:55:30] PC4 lab that the Peter Doherty Institute and a lot of them are maintaining, and a lot of them are working out there putting up amazing data centers, hospitals, office towers, so it's really so important. The way in which their work will improve is collaborating with different parties and coming up with new ideas, and that's why I was quite interested to see how we link immunology to [00:56:00] public health and construction, and try and-
Professor Peter...: Basically, our institute, the research that we do, though we're not employed directly by government, a lot of it is funded by government grants. Some of it is funded by international grants, by philanthropy. We've got grants from the Gates Foundation. Wow we are in the middle of this COVID-19 thing, we've got money coming in from all [00:56:30] sorts of places. But basically, we're funded by the philanthropy or by government grants on the whole, and so in a sense, we're there for the community.
Professor Peter...: Now we're in a position where we can step up to the plate and do something that's directly useful that people are aware of. It's there in the background all the time, but you don't need to know about it because it's just normal business. But that's our job, is to try and get good information out. [00:57:00] That's what I'm focused on. My younger colleagues are all running the labs, doing the experiments, and writing up the stuff, and doing all that stuff. I'm out there just talking to people who want to talk to me.
Sumit Oberoi: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it, Peter. Yeah, let's keep in touch. I'll definitely look at your book and look forward to your [00:57:30] next book, How We Got Through COVID-19.
Professor Peter...: Oh, that one, yeah, and also the one on tennis, which is very good.
Sumit Oberoi: Yeah, and hopefully we'll be able to get back to normal life and support our families and the community, and also support small business and get back into the pubs and have a nice cold beer.
Professor Peter...: Yes, that's right. Basically, guys [00:58:00] of your age are at relatively lower risk, of course. It's really after age 60 that the risk ramps up. But some of your workers would be older, I guess, and the older ones are at more risk.
Sumit Oberoi: That's why I think the industry has really supported, both party support from an employer and union side, to get good guidelines that are intelligent and easy to implement on site as well. That's pretty important.
Professor Peter...: Okay, [00:58:30] well-
Sumit Oberoi: We'll keep in touch. Yeah, thanks a lot once again, Peter. Appreciate your time today.
Professor Peter...: Okay, bye.
Sumit Oberoi: Bye.