Lab 023: Don’t Pass the Corona

Well, if you can't tell I'm congested, I'm sick.

Yes, and I'm worried about you friend, because my friend can't even laugh?

Did you hear that?

But it's not just me.

I feel like everybody is sick, yes, and I understand it, but I also don't understand it right.

And the thing that is making us all feel very nervous about everybody that's sick is the coronavirus.

Yeah, there's pandemonium panic about coronavirus. You know all on my Instagram and Twitter. Y'all are out here wearing nail shop mask and it's not right.

I haven't said anything.

I saw some of Walker had on gloves and masks. He's not playing around. I've seen a lot of people that have been using all types of tricks to try and keep these germs away. My poor friend. You hear that?

Sad laugh.

We're going to get through this episode.

We will. I'm going to try to suppress the cough.

I'm TT and I'm Zakijah and from Spotify Studios.

This is Dope Labs.

This episode is all about coronavirus, and we're gonna go through everything we know up until this point with the coronavirus expert doctor Kizmikia Corbett from the National Institutes of Health or NIH.

Yeah, so let's jump into the recitation.

All right, So today we're talking about coronavirus. I know you're seeing those memes and.

Tweet tweets and the articles, yes, news clips, everything. It's all over the internet.

And it can all become really confusing really fast. I saw some pictures and I was like, I'm not sure that these were even taken in twenty twenty. The people, the way the whole background looks. I was like, people are just reusing clips, sharing stuff.

During images, but as a World Health Organization logo on it and just sending it out for.

Everybody sharing it, and they're shared it for laughs.

But then the next person that shares it doesn't say this was a joke for my friend exactly.

And we have misinformation everywhere exactly.

So people are walking around saying all types of stuff that I'm just like that that don't sound right, does not.

Work, And I've been trying to not be a well actually in everybody's mentions, but it feels so tempting.

So we know what you guys are saying on the internet, and in memes, but we wanted to know what y'all were saying on the street.

I feel like the flu is more effective on the demographic based off the fact that there's more depths from the flu than it is Corona. As of right now, until we're able to get more scientific facts and see what's going on with it, I can't say too much, but I definitely think the flu is worse.

You know, I think we're probably overreacting slightly.

I did go on Amazon to see if they had any paper masks on Prime and they're all out, so I think they're all on Prime.

I can borrow Okay, I'm going.

To the party and they asked me to bring some beer, So went out yesterday.

I bought a couple of six packs.

When they bought some Corona and the checkout person said, oh, I'm glad someone's buying Corona, And she said, actually, sales of Corona are going down because people think but somehow Corona beer is connected to the coronavirus.

Are you nervous?

You travel a lot.

I'm not nervous about coronavirus. I spent a lot of time in Liberia when the Ebola outbreak was in full swing, and so I guess I have a little bit of experience and working in those kinds of situations. And if you're careful and and and stay away from the most intense places, then there's not much danger. But I certainly don't think there's any danger anywhere in the United States or outside of a few places outside of Wuhan.

This episode is going to be doubly as good because my friend Zakiya, who is whole in her chest as she's laughing, stop it. My poor friend is also an expert in all of these things, so she really understands coronavirus, how it moves and shakes and everything like that. So we're going to be using her brain to help us get through this episode.

I wouldn't say I'm a coronavirus expert, but I love all things micro All the bacteria and viruses are my friends, and I love to learn about them and talk about them. This is the one time I've missed teaching microbiology. Okay, this feels like the best time to be in a class in a classroom.

So what do we want to know?

So we want to know?

Well, let's start with I want to know. Okay, that's what I want to know is basic. I want to know what is a coronavirus. I want to know where it came from? How did this just come out of what seems like nowhere? What do you want to know?

I want to know how is it spread? I want to know what's been changing over time?

Right?

And is there a need for panic and worry? What can we due to prevent transmission and spread?

Like?

How much is in our hands? How much can we control? And how much is just set and stone? I love that let's jump into the dissection to help us out. We call them doctor Kismikia Corbett.

I am Kismekia Corbett.

I am a senior research Fellow and the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccine and Inminopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine and Research Center.

I am a North Carolinian, I'm black, I'm a woman, and all the things.

So the question that I need answered because I mean, we know generally how virus moves and shakes because of our Protect your Neck episode that was lab for so I learned a lot from that, But I feel like this is different and I need to know what exactly coronavirus is.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses actually, generally speaking, coronavirus infect bats, civic cats, etc.

All right, did you hear that? Because I've seen your memes with corona beers and that's not the link.

Okay.

We asked doctor Corbett to explain why it's called a coronavirus, and she told us it has to do with the physical properties of the virus. The thing to remember is that the word corona is Latin for crown.

I like my coronas with a line.

Oh, the surface of the virus actually looks like the crown that a queen would wear. Right, So think about the inside of the virus being a queen's head and then the surface of the virus being like the crown. And actually that crown is made up of some proteins that are called spike proteins. They just are spiking up off of the surface of the virus. And so basically you have this ball with a crown of spikes around it, and that's what the virus looks like.

Just building on that model of a ball with a crown. That ball contains the genetic information to make more virus when it enters a host sale and that ball is also coded in proteins that create kind of an envelope around it, and then some of those proteins stick up, and those are the spike proteins that give the coronavirus

Yeah?

There actually are so two of them. You've probably heard of MERZ, which is short for Middle Eastern Respiratory syndrome, and so we had a big MYRRZ outbreak in twenty twelve, and then SARS, which is severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Right, I remember that in two thousand and three.

Yes, that's right.

There are also a couple other coronaviruses that are less well known, and sometimes when people say, oh I had the flu, or I felt I had this respiratory infection, or I felt bad, sometimes people have actually been infected by some of those other coronaviruses. So the coronavirus isn't new to humans. They're a respiratory virus family that we've known about. But this particular virus is new. Wow, that is crazy. So a lot of us might have had one of the other coronaviruses before, but not this one.

That's right.

The coronavirus that's all of the news right now is called the twenty nineteen in coronavirus.

And that INN stands for novel or new, So what that means is that it is new to humans and it is new to the phylogenetic tree.

Scientists use the phylogenetic tree to understand relationships, so they may ask is this virus more or less closely related to another virus based on similarity.

The symptoms of the twenty nineteen novel coronavirus are cough, fever, shortness of breath, and some patients have even reported having nausea, vomited, diarrhea, and in some cases symptoms progress to bronchitis or pneumonia. And now that we understand some of the basics about the coronavirus, let's look at what's happening right now. Where did this particular coronavirus come from?

So there are you know, hundreds of species of coronaviruses that dwell in animal reservoirs.

Animal reservoirs are animal sources where the virus might be found. So for the swine flu, the animal reservoir was pigs. For bird flu, it was birds. So even though the virus is new to humans, it had to have a host before, and scientists have been working to figure out where the new coronavirus was before it showed up in humans.

It probably for however many years, I mean upwards of hundreds has been circulating in I think they've now named the reservoir to solidly be the bat, So it's probably been circulating in bats. Okay, So if a virus exists in bats, how does it get to humans?

That's a good question, right, So the first thing you might ask is what's the genetics of it? Like, how is that even possible? Yeah, and it's possible that you know, we haven't encountered it before. We aren't that different from bats, That's the thing to remember. We're both vertebrates and mammals, you know, So there's genetic similarity between humans and bats, and our whole sales might be similar to bats, so

One of those things that is similar enough between us and bats in this particular case is the receptor for the virus. So the molecule on cells that this virus binds to is enough similar between bats and humans that with some slight modifications and evolution, which is what viruses do, they evolve, it could become more and more infectious to a human.

So thinking about that, right.

The first documented case of twenty nineteen in coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China, at an open marketplace, and there are a variety of ways that it could have infected people there.

The second thing is how do you get a bat and a human physically close enough to transfer the virus? You know, you can pick up bat poop in a cave and sequence tons of coronaviruses. I mean, so it could have just been you know, they're in a open seafood market. You know, bats fly in there at night, handle their you know business.

I think doctor Corbett hit a really good point. You don't have to go into a cave to come in contact with a bat.

Yeah.

You know, as our population grows and we're expanding in a different space, is what used to be wildlife area is now your backyard?

Right?

I see fox running through my front yard almost every morning.

Really, yeah, I don't see anything but my neighbor's dog wildlife.

What we do know is that you can find coronavirus in batpoop. Okay, right, I don't even know what batpoop looks like.

Do you know?

It could be on the table and I would pick it up too, because I wouldn't know what it was. No, I don't want to say I would pick it up, but you.

Know, I mean you don't know what it is.

You don't know what it is.

I have no idea it could be. It could look like erase or shavings. I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna brush this off.

So now you got viral particles on your hand, and if you're working in an open air market, you could be So this is something where it could be on the food, right, or where you could be shaking hands with somebody or you can cover your mouth to cough or I mean anything right where this could be shared or spread around, or.

Touch a door knob, or touch something that a lot of people touch. You get on the bus, yeah, you sit down in the bus seat, you touch the seat, you touch the handles.

Yeah, that's that's so important. So if you work in the market, you have multiple opportunities to contact with tons of people, and then those people are contacting other people, and right now we don't know a lot about how the transmission works, right, And I think a good point that you made was that as our population grows and we have less space for the wildlife, so their habitats are getting smaller because we're encroaching on their space, the rate that we are going to be coming in contact

That's right, that's right, it's so true.

And I think the other thing is, even as a rate increases, it's important to know that not all animal viruses can adapt to humans. Even if a virus does make it to a human, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to become a global health emergency like this novel coronavirus.

Has these bats, for example, or whatever animal is. Their reservoir carries the virus, and maybe a human does come in contact with it, and maybe a human does get.

Infected with it. But we're not the natural host for these viruses. They're really not made for humans.

So the virus doesn't hasn't built up the capability to replicate efficiently and transmit from human to human efficiently.

And that is the key thing to remember is that viruses can evolve.

So that virus at first brushes up against a human and that immune system has not seen this before, so it doesn't even really know what to do. But then also the virus itself doesn't know what to do. It doesn't have the tools it needs in order to infect and get into that hostel and get into the kitchen and start cooking.

Yes, And so that one isn't able to replicate, right, That one maybe doesn't infect a human. But let's continue on in time, right, And so as the virus continues to exist in this animal reservoir, which we say is a bat. Now remember we have similarity to bats. So now your virus is robust. Right, It's like, hey, I've been lifting weights. I've been pumping iron. So now it interacts with a human in Wuhan, and it's like, yo, I got a Swiss army knife.

I'm ready.

I know exactly how to pick this lock. This same key that I use in bats. I'm going to try it right over here. Skeleton key, skeleton key. Turns out we got the same lock, right.

And now I'll let myself in.

I'll let my that's right, I love my friend. I'll let myself in.

And now it's using your cast are skilling okay, and it's cooking up more virus, just cooking up more virus. And so now you have virus that's replicating in humans. So it's adapted, right, and this particular coronavirus has adapted to be able to not only go from animal to human, but now to transmit from human to human pretty efficiently.

There are now over seventeen thousand confirmed cases and over three hundred and fifty.

Deaths, and that number is just going to continue to rise. It's wild, it is.

And because this has spread to over two dozen countries, the World Health Organization has declared the twenty nineteen coronavirus a global health emergency.

When we come back. We'll talk about how the virus has spread, what scientists like doctor Corbett are doing to stop it, and what you should do in the coming weeks. And we're back. Let's talk about how coronavirus spreads. Infected people can share the virus by coughing, sneezing, or touching others.

Diligence behind what you're doing in your everyday life can prevent a lot of infections. You know, coughing into your sleeve and not your hand, washing your hands, etc.

We all know that people aren't great about keeping their germs to themselves. So how worried should we be about contracting coronavirus?

You shouldn't be alarmed by Now there's human and human transmission in the United States, Like, that's what viruses do.

A recent case of novel coronavirus in Washington State found that the virus is not only in the lung and lung excres so coughing and sneezing, yes, but it was also found in this individual's fecal matter, that's poop.

This is another reason why handwashing is so important. This is how stomach viruses are transmitted.

Yeah, people don't think about that. Fecal to oral route.

Right nasty.

The virus is doing what it set out to do.

Last time I checked, I believe the case fatality rate was around still around two or three percent rate.

So the case fatality rate is fairly low.

More often than not, the people that succumbed to coronavirus infections have prior ailments or our elderly.

Two to three percent means two to three people per one hundred, right, So when you think about this, just for some context, MERZ killed about thirty percent of the people it infected. SARS kill is about ten percent, and that's.

Not necessarily beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint for a virus like you don't want to kill your host.

These viruses are setting up shop in your body rent free. They need you and your host seals is that they could keep replicating and existing.

And so what we're talking about now is two to three. So the fatality rate for this coronavirus is much lower than the other two we've seen. Right, thinking about their existence, let's talk about their eradication. This gets us right to doctor Corbett's work. She and her team are working on a coronavirus vaccine.

And this isn't as easy as you might think. You can't just say, make a vaccine. It's not trivial to create immunity. To that right, you have to do some things, some designing, protein engineering, manipulation, platform delivery.

One of the most important steps to infection is viral attachment. That knocking on the wholesales door is done when a viral protein attaches to or binds to a receptor on a human cell.

We study, you know, particular amino acid sites on proteins, and you know, study how various mutations and viral proteins effects, whether it be like an iminogenicity or expression in cell culture.

Doctor Corbett is talking about a couple of things here. You want to understand what site on a protein is important for attaching to a wholesale and then you also need to understand which receptor on your wholet sale is important. So, for example, a lung cell has over a thousand different surface proteins. Oh my gosh, so somebody's got to figure out which one this newly discovered virus binds to.

And doctor Corbett is optimistic that a vaccine will be in clinical trials soon and.

The reason why the research is actually moving so fast is because people have been studying these, including myself for some time. You know, we study B cells, we study T cells here I don't particularly, but we do have a T cell expert in our lab. You know, we study the antibodies on the mono level. So like one antibody, we will study it for how well it binds to a thing, how well does it kill a virus, how well does it do this, what other the mechanisms does

But until the vaccine comes out, what should we do from a public health perspective?

Be aware, but don't panic. You know, people are like, oh, should I get on the plane? What if somebody came in from China? First of all, the CDC is screening heavily, and they are the best in the world at what they do. The Centers for Disease Control, the United States Centers for Disease Control is amazing with diagnostics and prevention and screening. And so still get on planes, still hang out with your friends. If, for example, this thing turns out to spread across the country, I have no idea

I think that was pretty clear advice.

We went into this trying to figure out what a coronavirus is, where its name came from, and where it came from.

And I think we've done those things. How it spreads.

You know, we have one route that's lung secretions, coughing, sneezing, and we have another potential route oral fecal and then I think the next thing is how worried we should be about this. I think it's important to have some context.

Absolutely.

You know a lot of this early reporting about you know, transmission, So how many people can be infected from one case. That is transmission under a certain set of conditions, Right, that's transmission when nobody knows that coronavirus is a thing, and so that's transmission where you might have a different

That's very different.

Anything could happen, Anything could happen.

There are a lot of variables that.

Are important to determining the transmission rate, right, And we can't just neglect all those things and say, oh, all Asian people have coronavirus. That's racist, it's racist, and it's ridiculous scientifically, right. What we know is in this space and time where we are right now, global trade and global travel is real. Right, So, yes, this was identified in Wuhan, but that's it, right, It was identified in Wuhan, and everybody that's in Wuhan wasn't necessarily Chinese, and everybody

And what we also know is that you know, people are drawing back and making phases when someone is sneezing or coffin. Yeah, sure, but also the incubation period before you start showing symptoms is two to fourteen days. That means if you have a long incubation period, it takes a while before you can catch this stuff, right, And so that's part of why we see this really big increase in the number of cases, because you can be asymptomatic for a long time.

Right. So, just like doctor Corbett said, there are things that we can do to help eradicate this disease from our communities, and that is doing the right hygienic things in order to make sure that the virus isn't spreading. If the virus can't spread and attached to another whost sale and you then and I got a choice but to go away.

I think another thing just in the about hygiene, I don't even want to get into the mask. Okay, leave the mask to the public health workers. I see, y'all, you're wearing your mask inside out. I'm like that you've turned it the wrong way.

They don't even have the right type of grade mask to keep out something of that.

A viral particle is so small.

Yeah, you have to go and research those.

You need to read.

But I think the thing here is to understand distance that viral particles can travel. So if we're talking about coughing and sneezing. And what's the travel distance for the uhan virus. It can only travel about six feet from an infected person. Okay, now we don't know much about it being able to exist on surface, how long that lasts.

Oh my gosh.

So I'm just gonna drop that there. And so I think you know the those are kind of things that you need to think about.

Don't sleep on coffing into your sleeve like some people are thinking that, Oh, the virus will travel through your sleep. Like it matters, Like if you put it on your hand, we touch everything with our fingers. Like if you put it in your in the in the what do you touch yourn, the clock on your arm. You're not touching things with that, yes, and all those little things make a big difference.

It's so true. I think I've learned a lot about this.

The coronavirus and how it's spreading has been a really good exercise for me in critical reading, right and what I see in inspecting the memes that I that people are sharing that I make sure I don't then share exactly. Also, it's a great exercise in public health, like what people understand, what they know and don't know, and it helps us see some of the outages, you know. I think for me this was a great eye opener and I'm like, oh, I need to do a lot more science.

Outreach to my own people, exactly, to my own folks.

Yeah, it be your own people.

That's it for Lab twenty three.

Don't forget to check out our website for our cheat sheet on today's episode and our show notes because we are dropping all the links to everything you need to read on Dope labspodcast dot com. We had to talk about coronavirus because it is everywhere. But it's also a Black History.

Month, yes, and for our semester finale, which is in two weeks, yes, very exciting. We want to highlight all of the black people in Stem all over the world. So if you are black in Stem, or you know somebody that's black in Stem, tell them to go to Dope lasspodcast dot com slash Stem to look for information on how they can be a part of our semester finale.

Yes, I can't wait to hear from y'all.

Also, we love.

Hearing from you. What do you think about today's lab? What are your ideas for future labs? Our number is to zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.

Also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcasts. T T is on Twitter at d R Underscore.

T s h O, and you can find Zakiya at z Said So.

Follow us on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Special thanks to our guests doctor Kismikia Corbett. We have links so you can learn more about her previous work and current work in our show notes. This episode of Dope Labs is produced by Jenny rattlit Mass of Wave Runner Studios and Elizabeth Nikano. Mixing and sound designed by Hannis Brown.

Original theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugi Eura, with additional music by Elijah Alex Harvey. Dope Labs is a production of Spotify Studios and Mega Own Media Group, and it's executive produced by us T. T. Shadia and Zakiah Wattley. Wrong This was supposed to be Yeah down Below, damn here.

When you said wrong or got so nervous, I was like, you doing.

It wrong now, I said I was talking to my thumb. I was like, that's not right, because then it's I don't mean.

You wouldn't talk to me like that.

I would not. I would never, So don't talk to you like that. Okay, I'll try my best.