Family Contracted COVID-19 While Distancing But Without Masks.
HARLOW: While coronavirus cases continue to rise across the country, a doctor and his physician wife are warning, Do not make the same mistake that they did. My next guest writes, in part, quote, "We visited family this weekend" -- this was two weekends ago -- "and eight of the 11 people we saw -- not all at the same time -- are now lab-confirmed COVID-positive. We did not wear masks while visiting with family because we let our guard down and thought we were safe. Please be careful, everyone. COVID-19 is just so contagious." With me now is Dr. Miles Cobia. Good morning. I'm sorry that you have had this, your wife; you're both doctors, you're both generally pretty careful. You've got a sweet little girl, almost two years old, Claire, she was symptomatic as well. What is your warning to people? Like, what did you do -- and despite those precautions, this happened?</s>MILES COBIA, NEUROLOGIST: Yes. I mean, for those of you that haven't seen the tweet, to set this up, you know, we have been -- my wife is pregnant, she's 28 weeks pregnant. We have been exceedingly precautious, both at work and outside of work. We've really just been at home, we've been ordering even our groceries through delivery services and things. We had a long vacation set up for July. And I finished my fellowship in June, 13 years of training. And so I actually had scheduled time here in July to take off, we were going to take a long vacation to Florida Obviously, we didn't feel like that was safe. We scrapped that idea. And a couple weeks before the weekend, we ended up going to the lake, which was the -- July the 11th and the 12th. We decided that maybe a secluded lake house on a smaller lake in Alabama might be a better option for us, so we went ahead and booked that for a couple days. And then as we got closer to the trip, we entertained the idea of -- you know, we hadn't seen our family, really, much at all, obviously, in five months, and a lot of, you know, fatigue had started to set in with us, especially my wife being pregnant and she's a hospital medicine physician who's been around, you know, COVID sporadically throughout the last five months. So we opened the idea of inviting our family to the lake, immediate family only. We went through and carefully selected who we invited, we -- there were some people that we just didn't feel comfortable inviting because they had been to bars or had certain opinions about masks and hadn't been wearing them in public, so --</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>COBIA: -- we invited the ones that we thought had been safe. We went to the lake house on the 11th and 12th, really basically from noon on the 11th, on a Saturday, until noon on Sunday. We were outside the entire time. At no point were all of the adults there together. In total, if you count my wife, my daughter and myself, there were 11 total people that interacted that weekend. But at no point was everybody there. Some people were there on Saturday, some people Sunday. But we were outdoors the entire time in the lake, in the river, you know, in the yard, on the porch. We went to bed at 10:00 p.m., that's the only time we were in the house --</s>HARLOW: Right.</s>COBIA: -- asleep. Woke up the next morning, went out. And were outside the whole time.</s>HARLOW: So look, you guys, the one thing you didn't do that you are very open about is --</s>COBIA: Didn't have masks.</s>HARLOW: -- you didn't wear masks. And I have so many friends, and know so many people that are sort of operating in these pods or these quarantine circles, they're talking about it for school, if school doesn't start, maybe getting their kids together to educate. Your message to them is, do not -- do not do it without a mask.</s>COBIA: Yes, that's the real message. Is that even though we were outside, and we tried to stay socially distanced, even then, eight people out of that 11 are now positive with symptoms. I mean, so you know, that's really the message to people on this. I know there are areas of the country where people -- that were hit harder, where people, I'm sure, are very reluctant to have these gatherings. But I can tell you from experience, having been on that lake and looking around the lake while we were there, every single house was packed, it looked like it was the Fourth of July weekend, so.</s>HARLOW: So when you talk about Alabama -- because you're right, I mean, things are different here in New York right now, we'll see what happens, but they're different in different states. You're -- the state of Alabama's seen the highest seven-day average for new daily cases. Governor Kay Ivey has issued an executive order, mandating masks across the state. But it expires on July 31st. It's the 22nd today. Does it need to be extended far beyond a week from now?</s>COBIA: That would be, obviously, my recommendation. I mean, we have obvious anecdotal evidence that in our case, you know, I truly trust masking, we've been doing it religiously for five months. And the weekend that we didn't do it, regardless of whether we were outside, we still spread it. So --</s>HARLOW: Yes.</s>COBIA: -- you know, I would be very big advocate for extending it until we know that there is no longer rampant community spread of the virus.</s>HARLOW: Dr. Cobia, thank you for you, you know, your candor here, telling us this so we can all learn from what you say is your mistake. Good luck to your wife, congratulations on the little one on the way.</s>COBIA: All right, thank you.</s>HARLOW: Talk to you soon -- Jim.</s>COBIA: All right.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes, we wish them the best of luck. Well, Africa's worst-hit country in the COVID outbreak is part of some very encouraging vaccine research, but there are still challenges. A live report from Johannesburg, South Africa, next.