Oh hey, just a quick preamble, a little update. Today is March eighteenth. This was recorded just about a week ago, not that long ago at all, but already go a lot of updates. And I just want to let you know that I reached out to doctor Shannon Bennett and asked if she had anything else she wanted to let us know, just as a quick update on this, and she said, quote daily, new confirmed cases are growing in
number exponentially here in the US. And that is in light of one of the lowest per capita testing rates worldwide by country. That's twenty six tests per million people as of March tenth. And that means that even though we all recognize that confirmed cases are just the tip of the iceberg of actual infections, in the US, our iceberg is particularly submerged. In short, it's time to take
social distancings seriously and flatten the curve. So this episode will tell you what you need to know about COVID nineteen, how it spreads, how it affects the human body, and why it's so important right now to isolate. So if you are isolating social distance, seeing staying in, staying out at the bars, we can do this y'all, I myself haven't left the house since Thursday. It's very cozy. So
thanks for listening to this, thanks for staying informed. And here is the broadcast that came out on March tenth. Stay safe, wash your hands. Oh hey, it's your friend who washes her hands roughly five times more often than she did last week. Allie Wood back with a spech ep of ologies. So this episode is coming out March tenth, and it was not even conceived of until a few days ago. But guess what we need it. I wanted it,
we made it. So pass it on to anyone who needs a distillation of what the hell is going on and how much we should be freaking out. It's fascinating, its informative. I'm so glad these ologists were available. But first, kind of a secret up top. I mentioned last year as a secret at the end of an episode that I was shooting a new show for Netflix, And y'all, it finally comes out this week on March thirteenth, this Friday.
It's called one hundred Humans, and it's bananas. We got one hundred people who represent the demographics of the United States, and alongside social psychologists and statisticians ran them through experiments to see if people are more biased than they than they are, and if having fun makes you more productive, and if the placebo effect works in New age SPA treatments and what age group could build furniture the fastest. It's wild. It's out March thirteenth. It's on Netflix. Please
do watch it. Tweet about it. The hashtag is one hundred humans. Okay. Also, thank you to everyone who has ever contributed to patreon dot com slash ologies and made the show possible. Thanks everyone who's out there where in ologies merch, and for everyone who boosts the show and keeps it up among the science giants, just by rating it and making sure you're subscribed and texting links to
your friends like a virus. And of course those of you who review it for me to creep and weep, such as this week's from Booby rocks Out, who says a dear dad word, I'm ready because I have some rather big news I wanted to share with you. I got into grad school. That was all caps. Sorry to
shout at you, but I'm just so very excited. Listening to your wild and wacky podcast inspired me to finally finally pursue my dream of a PhD. So thanks for that and all the hard work you do to show us that smart people are really just people like the rest of us, awkward, gross funny, suffering from imposter syndrome and all the rest. Booboo rocks out hell Yes to a botany related episode one day, Go get him. Also, listener, kg Demorst, happy to have put a scatological smile on
your face. Okay, virology, we're in it. Let's get into it. I had planned to interview the director of Science at the California Academy of Sciences, this batite, brunette badass, doctor Shannon Bennett, for a colcidology episode about mosqueters and Skeeter diseases and malaria and Dengey fever and Zeka. And I arrived with your Patreon questions in hand, and as her
wonderful assistant Andrew was walking me down the hallway. Hey Andrew, he mentioned that doctor Bennett had just given a talk to all the staff members at the cal Academy of Sciences about COVID nineteen. As she is a virologist, it is very up on the topic and the research and the outreach. Hot damn, I said, let's change this entire up.
We're doing virology, which comes from the Latin virus meaning poisonous substance, which comes from the word for a sap of plants or a slimy liquid, a potent juice, which is, after all, what is dripping from our face openings, threatening to kill friend and foe alike. And we're all pretty scared and confused. Now. Because this is a really huge and important topic, I figured, let's make this kind of a bit of a salad with more than one ologist. Let's make it a speci app Let's get a little crazy.
I also reached out to previous guests, including disastrologists doctor Samantha Montano. I sprinkled in some wisdom from disinfectanologist and bleach chemist doctor Evan Rumberger, and also touched base with beloved chiropterrologists doctor Merlin Tuttle about pointing our unwebbed fingers accusationally toward the batcaves. But the backbone of this special episode is doctor Shannon Bennett, who sat down for a full length chat about her work and this new novel virus.
She's knowledgeable and passionate and addresses not only the genetics of the virus, but the symptoms and infection rate and prevention and testing, and how we should handle the fear and the seeming chaos of a pandemic and what these virus population curves mean. And if you're freaked out, that's okay, but you will leave it feeling armed and empowered, I promise.
So wash your hands, calm your nerves, and feed your brains with this bonanza of Corona with four ologists folks, a disaster handler, a hygiene scientist, a batman, and, of course, chief of Science at the California Academy of Sciences, virologist doctor Shannon Bennett. Okay, I handed doctor Bennett at Mike and instantly apologized that she had to touch something I touched and we were off.
I'm going to give you this.
I'm sorry that it's okay. We'll just watched later. Sure we're impermeable, yes, right, yes, only if we take this and touch our eyes nose them out. We're washing.
So we're said, that's a good point. I got to stop touching my face.
Fifth, on average, fifteen times an hour and ninety times a day, we touch our face. Oh, we don't even know it Are you serious? Yeah, And I think it's part of our grooming heritage. You know, as primates, we groom and we're always grooming, and we just don't even know it.
And we can't touch other people's faces right.
Well, that you know. Socially we don't usually.
Do that either, but okay, good to know.
And you are a molecular epidemiologist, you are a virologist. You've got a lot of ologies under your belts.
It's really fun.
Yeah, how many? You also microbiology too?
I call myself a microbiologist because I study viruses in the context of the rest of the microbial world they live in. And so virologist and microbiologist why not? Yeah, and molecular demiologist.
And you've got a busy week. You've got a busy couple of weeks, haven't you.
It's been very exciting.
Oh my goodness, your work, I know has. You've spent a lot of your time looking at mosquitoes in malaria and dengey fever. And you, yourself, I understand, have not just been a doctor but also a patient in this right.
Yes, yeah, I think you really have to know your study organisms intimately. So what better way to do that than to be a host yourself. It was not done on purpose though, right part of the experience that led to my origin stories as an ologist.
Can you tell me a little bit about like when did you start looking at things that our microscopes? When did you start wondering about how things jump from animals to humans? When did it all happen?
Right? So I liked biology, I liked being outdoors. But outdoors and biology that's a huge scope of things you could focus on, and I have no focus. Until very late in my undergraduate program, I had an opportunity to go to West Africa and as a volunteer for the summer, and I worked with communities to talk about primary health care challenges but using theater. It was really interested in
theater and as a teaching tool. And in the daytime I taught Grade five math and in the evenings I taught a theater program.
Y'all, this ologist journey started because she was a theater nerd Oh my heart.
And like every good citizen, I went to my public health professional and I got all the vaccines and antimallarial medicines that I needed, and six weeks later I had to Africa and within two weeks.
I caught malaria.
Oh, and everybody said, this malaria is resistant to all those anti malarias you Westerners are prescribing this mosquito worn parasite.
It's not a virus.
Malaria is caused by a parasite a U carry out really to us at the cellular level. It had evolved resistance and continues to evolve resistance very rapidly. So that was my first lesson. A things change, yes, then I so I was wrestling with malaria and the fever chills cycle. That is a hallmark of that pathogen. And I picked up amoebic dysentery. Oh yeah, so amoebic dysentery is caused by a little Also you carry out single celled animal
and to amba histolytica. So it hisstalytica comes from the fact that it melts your tissues in your colon and your intestine and creates bloody ulcers. And so the first hallmark is you look and you see bloody stool. So I saw a lot of blood in my stool. I got a little concerned. Sure enough, I had amybic dysentery. Still wrestling with fever chills from malaria. Oh my gosh, so they shipped me off to a leper colony. Leprosy is caused by a bacterium.
So they literally sent you to a leper.
Colony only place to get nursing care.
I thought that was like a perhaps an exaggeration, but no.
It's true. I was hospitalized in a leper colony. They had nursing care there, and leprosy. Even though there's a lot of social stigma around leprosy, it actually is not very infectious. It's transmitted through families, so it can look infectious, just like coronavirus right now is being transmitted through families, but it turns out that it's a combination of long intimate exposure and genetic predisposition, so it's not very infectious. So it was perfectly fine for me to be hospitalized
in a leper colony. It was a very very casual, pleasant experience. But I saw lots of evidence of people with leprosy or recovering from leprosy, and it typically causes your lower extremities to atrophy and drop off eventually, so that was interesting the understatement of the year. I had also picked up a skin infection while I was there, so we have microbes on our skin, a whole complement of them, and one of them is a Staphylococcus bacterium oh,
which basically I had an open wound. I think it was a mosquito bite that I'd scratched, or maybe it was a cut on my leg, and it got infected with staff and I was getting spiky fevers from staff, so it striations down my leg and it was all very exciting. So I had a double triple whammy of two U carry outs and a bacterium, and then I was surrounded by a bacterial infection. So I had a lot of time to languish in the hospital. You were a hot mess and think about my plight and understand
that things were out there all the time. They're either in human communities or non human communities. They're evolving, they're changing. I came out of it with kind of a new a deep appreciation and admiration were the incredible diverse world of microorganisms, whether they're viruses or bacteria or eukaryots, and what it was to be a host and what it was to be a parasite and conquer all these barriers.
Right like a worthy adversary type of respect.
They call it an arms race, and truly that's maybe not quite fair because they have us beat in terms of being able to evolve more rapidly and have more on the line.
Right, So doctor Bennett says that viruses are under a lot of pressure to be really good at being effective parasites, whereas we have to defend ourselves against all kinds of things, not just these viruses, so we're outsmarted mostly in speaking
of smarts. She went on to get her Bachelors of Science in biology from McGill University and her PhD in zoology from the University of British Columbia, but that was after she recovered from her hands on experience with pathogens and how did you keep your spirits up when you were in a leper colony with three diseases.
It was incredibly inspiring to see people with leprosy making a positive contribution to their own lives, in each other's lives. It was a They called these leper colonies because they're
ostracized and they basically they worked together. They have an economy, they were creating crafts, and they were innovating ways of sustainable farming before the rest of the world was even thinking about it, so, you know, caging animals over fish ponds, so the poop went fertilized the fishes, and then they had this sort of way of you know, keeping the whole thing going. So it was a very admirable approach
to living with a disease. Yeah, and then while I was in the Leper colony, there was an attempted coup. This was in Liberia in nineteen eighty nine, so it was the first harbinger of the nineteen ninety one Civil War. So I was there, I was I heard all the gunshots, machine gun fire. I'm so, I don't have deep experience with firearms. Anyway, it was on such an intense scale
that it was incredible. And it was while I was in the leper colony that I thought I was almost thankful for being there, thankful for being sick and in a lepar colony with all the stigma that implies. And they basically avoided us entirely, went through the village where it was definitely there were deaths and other atrocities of war, and we were completely isolated and protected from that.
I was never complaining about anything again. Ever.
Parasites saved my life, Oh my god.
And Now, when it comes to viruses, is a virus a parasite? What is a virus? What does it look like? What are we dealing with?
So I consider the term parasite, and many do as more of a way of life than it is a particular branch of the tree of life, because parasite literally means to dine at another's table. It comes from a Greek word. So it's really a way of making your way in the world, and it's evolved independently across many,
many different groups of living organisms. Bacteria can be parasitic, viruses can be parasitic eukaryotes, and then across the tree of life, many different kinds of eukaryots can be parasitic, from single celled organisms like Giardia or antomium or plasmodium which causes malaria, all the way to nematodes and tapeworms and flatworms and all those great wormy stuff. So it's a way of life.
It's a choice.
Now.
Arguably, many folks do not classify viruses themselves as living organisms because they kind of cheat and use the host cellular machinery to metabolize, is what everyone's dickering about. Oh but I consider them a life worm.
What are the basic components of a virus and what's the difference between an RNA virus. It's like, what when you've got this spiky little glob coming to take over your life, what is it equipped with?
So viruses are fairly simplified, but they're very diverse, and they're not even one single lineage. So when we talk about viruses, they probably arose multiple times, or if they didn't, and if they evolved from the same ancestor we can't track it back far enough in time to say one way or the other. They have a fairly simple structure, and it depends on which group of viruses you're talking about.
The viruses I work on have a simple what we call a nucleocapsid sort of like a lipid bilayer membrane with proteins that stick off of it, and that membrane structure contains the genetic information of the virus, and then that's it. So genetic information, some kind of coating, and
then some proteins that stick off the end. In the case of viruses that infect you caryotes, they use these proteins to bind to the host cell and then fuse into the host cell, past the host membrane into the cellular body of the host cell, and then that's where they pick up all this other you know, these other functions they need. They co op the host genome to make the building blocks that they need to replicate their genome.
So imagine a double layer outside that has all these very fetching protein accessories that just stick on to your cells. Just bust into them and then hack your coating to make more of itself. It's slick, also impolite.
And then depending on the kind of genome, and that too, is very diverse across the different viral groups. So there are viruses with double stranded DNA genomes like ours, and there are viruses with single stranded RNA genomes like the new novel coronavirus and the mosquito boring viruses I study, and the flavy Viridae family, which includes dngay and zika.
Talking a little bit about the novel coronavirus, why is it called the novel coronavirus? Why is it COVID nineteen and how long have we even had an inkling that it existed?
So it's gotten a new name. Now we got all on the same page, and we are calling it. The name officially is SARS coronavirus two a sequel, okay, So it's SARS stands for Severe Acute Respiratory syndrome virus so coronavirus CoV. And there was a STARS coronavirus. It emerged in late two thousand and two two thousand and three in Hong Kong via a wet market similar to this situation, and it's about eighty percent related to this coronavirus. So that's why we're calling it SARS coronavirus two.
Okay.
It has even closer relatives in known viruses that are out there in twenty fifteen twenty seventeen, some of those viruses are up to ninety six percent related to this virus. So in theory, we've known about this particular virus or at least it's very very close relatives since twenty fifteen,
maybe even for twenty seventeen. But we didn't know about this specific virus until it was first documented in China in the city of Wuhan and associated with a case cluster around a market, a wholesale it's called a seafood market one on seafood wholesale seafood market, but it sells lots of other different kinds of things, including live animals, wild and domesticated animals, so it's a very It's got lots of different potential bridge vectors of bridge animals that
could have brought the virus from a bat reservoir to humans, but we don't know. And that case cluster was right around the end of December December three, twenty nineteen. So the disease that this is causing, it's called coronavirus disease. So the name of that is called COVID nineteen. So that's where COVID nineteen comes from.
Oh got it for the year, Okay.
For the year and for the disease. So it's just like HIV is human immuno deficiency virus. Oh, okay, and the disease is AIDS. So same thing. HIV virus AIDS is the disease SARS. COVID two is the virus. COVID nineteen is the disease.
Oh that makes so much sense. Yeah, okay, So COVID nineteen corona viral disease from twenty nineteen, COVID nineteen. Also, after doing a chiropterology episode, I know that bats get a lot of flack, They take a lot of guano from us, And then how do they know that it wasn't from a snake that a bat aid or do they know for sure that it was the bats because the bats are so leaguered when it comes to infectious diseases.
So for bats it depends. Actually bats are hit way harder by fungi and with viruses, maybe it depends. So the way right now, all we know is based on the genetic information that the virus we're collecting now shares
with viruses that were collected from other bats. There was also viruses that were collected kind of accidentally from a survey of other animals, and in this case it was a pangolin, And we call it metagenomic because we were just people were characterizing the entire genetic soup without maybe
looking for this in particular. Out there in nature, there have been from independently from bats and from pangolins, sequences that look similar to this virus that was collected from humans got it, But there's not been a direct link to any particular animal in the market that could have been the bridge vector, or even any particular bat in the market that could have been linked to this emergence event. So it's all being done using circumstantial evidence of the
actual genetic relationship of the virus. And that's different from SARS and SARS they actually went and sampled specimens in the market and were able to draw a direct link. So we're not there yet. We're using the genetic information in the virus to say this is what it is.
Okay, So what does one do on a Saturday morning Hop on the horn with your favorite bad expert. So I dialed up the bat phone where chiropterologist and bat conservationist doctor Merlin title of Merlin title dot Org was standing by.
I wanted to get obviously your opinion and your expertise on coronavirus and how the bat conservation community is kind of dealing with rumors and just about bats being in the spotlight in a negative way.
Well, we're deeply concerned. I've had emergency requests from Malaysia, China and Me and mar all just in the last couple of days trying to head off eradication of bats.
I'm sure that your bat line, your bat phone is probably pretty overwhelmed right now.
Right we're getting contact from all over the world. Well, it's a huge setback for conservation of bats worldwide. Now, whether some of these coronaviruses and other animals first evolved in bats doesn't seem to me to be overly relevant to the current situation. The current situation involves eating. You know, the first hypotheses were that it came from eating cobras
or create snakes. Then it was pointed to panglins, and I even read one paper where they said, but they weren't going to go further with testing panglins, which had a ninety nine percent match. They be found anywhere from about eighty percent to ninety six percent genomic match with vats. That's really pretty meanless given that we're ninety six percent
genomically identical to chimpanzees. And I don't think anybody going on a date is worried about whether their date's going to turn out to be a chimpanzee.
Very true, even on tender you don't know what you're going to get, but you're probably not going to get a.
You know, all life on Earth is related at some point. What we know is that we have searched bats far more intensely than other animals because they're viralist dream come true. You can set a net or trap in front of a cave with thousands of bats and have all you can handle in terms of sampling in minutes. They're quick and easy to handle. By comparison, how would you like to go out and try to get thirty cobras for
your sample or thirty hyenas. I mean, you know that most of the other animals are hardly being looked at relatives to bats. Bats make absolutely superb scapegoats. They are little understood to begin with, and combine and match them with viruses which are little understood. And you know, the only viruses people know about are the ones that kill us. We have more viruses in our bodies than we have cells. People fear, they rarely tolerate, and often kill. Every animal
on Earth carries viruses that could potentially be harmful. There is no animal on earth more dangerous than our fellow humans that were fingering scapegoats to seemingly avoid admission of where the real problems are.
Yeah, so researchers think that while it may have been hanging out in bats for a long while, it wasn't until humans came in contact with perhaps a pangolin, which is an animal that looks like kind of a cross between an ant eater and some wind chimes made of seashells. But they're critically endangered in some areas because they're the world's most trafficked mammal. They're prized for their meat and
the medicinal properties of their scales. So humans tend to come in contact with these intermediate hosts like camels and pangolins and civets when we're catching and eating them. So the finger kind of points back to us as a species.
And as long as we're talking about finger pointing. During a talk doctor Bennett gave at the cal Academy, she made another great point about the xenophobia that can spike during an outbreak, and she reminds us that these pandemics come from all corners of the globe, from all kinds
of animals. Our common flu has killed by CDC estimations between twelve thousand and thirty thousand people in the US just since October twenty nineteen, and the two thousand and nine h one N one's wine flu, which came from pigs in North America, infected eleven to twenty one percent of the global population, killing half a million people. MERS aka Middle East Respiratory syndrome aka camel flu can be transmitted through contact with camels or by ingesting unpasteurized camel milk,
and it's a highly dangerous disease to those with comorbidities. SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, initially came on the scene in two thousand and two, and though the mortality rate was high, there were just over eight thousand cases resulting in seven hundred and seventy four deaths, So influenzas can be much more threatening now. SARS and MERS are both coronaviruses, which around spiky things. They are almost an adorable pestilence. And
I've seen pictures of it. It looks like a coushball, Yeah, an evil coushball, or like a dog toy. Right, bad intentions, just trying to live its life. I know, it's just trying to do its hustle. We just don't really like it. It's okay, I mean, congrats for being so successful so fast, but we don't like it. What exactly is it and how is it different from other coronaviruses, because is it cold a coronavirus.
Technically no, Okay, well not necessarily, I should say, so we when we refer to the common cold, there's actually tons of things that can cause common cold.
Yeah.
So there are a group of viruses called rhinoviruses that cause common cold like symptoms. There are two coronaviruses that jumped into humans from animal reservoirs that are in a different group of coronaviruses that I think up to twenty ten to twenty percent of common colds, maybe thirty are due to these human coronaviruses, but they're in a completely different cluster than these coronaviruses that include murrs and stars
and stars too. Now, so those are called these. This other group is called the beta coronaviruses, and they are not typically what we think of as common cold like symptoms. Common cold is usually upper respiratory with nas of phryngeal and throat and a lot of blowing your nose and sneezing. Whereas this virus, as well as STARS one, are more associated with and mirrors in fact with pneumonia like symptoms.
So they're infecting the lower respiratory tract. Got so the same with Stars two is that it seems to be associated with mostly lower respiratory and that comes with certain pathogenic implications because that's where you would get sort of pneumonia like symptoms associated with the lower respiratory tract.
Okay, so most of this interview with doctor Bennett took place in an office, but afterward I thought of a few more questions. So I met up with her in the planetarium at the Call Academy that evening after her talk and before our Museum Nightlife panel to ask her just a few more things.
So, this virus infects respiratory tissue, so it's mostly lung tissue, lower respiratory tissue, and then sometimes upper respiratory. So basically the symptoms are associated with a dry cough fever. Fever is the most common symptom. Eighty eight percent of all sick people develop fever, and it's not a particularly high fever, so like one hundred point four degrees and up, so people should check their temperature. Dry cough fatigue kind of like when you get the flu, you feel body ache
and fatigue and then shortness of breath. And shortness of breath we used to think was the most common symptom up there with fever as the most most common symptom, but it's maybe about twenty percent of people develop shortness of breath.
Okay, I heard that COVID nineteen can cause your lungs to fill up with blood or is that just a rumor?
So the people that are really getting this disease very severely are getting pneumonia. So anything that infects your lower respiratory trac can eventually result in pneumonia. And that's basically an inflammatory response of your body that fills your lungs up with fluid. Fluid that your body produces to fight infection, but it kind of goes crazy. It's what we call a cytokine storm. So there are many kinds of pneumonia. It's basically inflammation of the lungs. It can be caused
by bacteria, different kinds of bacteria. This is definitely consistent with viral pneumonia, which is really mostly associated with this sort of overwhelming cytokine response. So it's a big immune response that you're getting.
If you're coughing a lot.
And you're trying to get rid of the fluid in your lungs, probably blood might be in the sputum but in general it's pneumonia, okay.
Side note, cytokines are proteins made by your immune system and they do all kinds of signaling to moderate inflammation and immunity. When those cytokines go a little hogwild, it can affect the entire body, doing really intense damage to lungs and the liver and the kidneys and so a cytokine storm can cause multiple organ failure. So just think about that when you feel too lazy to wash your hands well, or when you just can't resist touching your face.
Multiple organ failure versus using some soap. Soap it is okay. But now back to the structure of the actual virus.
It's a coronavirus because of these spike proteins that us prickle off of. The I mentioned that the viruses have this containing nucleic capsid the genomes inside, and then sticking off of this nuclear capsid are proteins that are really important to help the virus bind to the host cell and then fuse. So what they have to do is they bind and then they trick the host cell into
basically engulfing it. It's called phagocytosis, and they engulf it into an internal bubble inside the cell called an endosome. And then once it's enclosed in the cell, it needs to punch through the host cell membrane to get into the cytoplasm of the cell and do its thing. Okay, And so it uses proteins to both bind to the cell and then once it gets engulfed, it uses those it uses proteins to tunnel to basically open up a
gateway fuse and pump itself in. And so the spike protein is very important in stars coronavirus two as well as stars coronavirus one, the original for binding to the host cell. So it's these proteins determine the what we call the host tropism, kind of host it combined to, and then the kind of cells within that host they can move into. So they're very important, and they give it this sort of beautiful halo effect because these spike proteins kind of stick out like a funny crown.
Yeah, that's where the corona comes from.
And that's where the corona comes from.
Yeah, and now I've seen the exponential growth curves, and have you seen that animated graph where they're all just kind of cruising along and then you see coronavirus and you just see it on this upward trajectory. That is horrifying, right, Why is it so scary and so successful so fast?
So there's a lot of unanswered questions. Yeah, we know that it's spike protein does differ from Stars the First Stars. The First Stars was different in that it caused a higher rate of mortality, so the case fatality rate was around ten percent. Wow, But it didn't transmit quite as rapidly. You would get infected with the virus and then it might take four to five days to develop symptoms. We call that the incubation period, and then for days after that,
another four to five days, you wouldn't be able to transmit. Oh, and then you'd only start to transmit after you'd been sick. So it made Stars the First Stars easy to contain, even though it was scary deadly. So this virus is not as deadly. Okay, it's rolling in at around the estimates vary depending on whether it's a population of older people with comorbidities or other health challenges. But it's coming in right around three percent plus or minus.
But what about conflicting reports that say the danger is no big deal, less than a fraction of a percent versus others that put the death rates much higher. Who's lying to us? And what do they want out of it? Is nobody lying? Is everybody lying?
Well?
What we're saying, so there are two words being used here. One is mortality and one is case fatality rate. Oh so we don't know how many people have the virus. So if you divided the number of deaths by all the unknown people that could have it, then yeah, maybe the mortality rate'd be pretty low. But what we're saying is it's about that Stars had a one in ten died.
That was the case fatality rate. And so with Stars coronavirus two, COVID nineteen the case fatality rate since and we're talking about COVID nineteen the disease now that is you know, three point four percent. So that's when you know it's a case. What's the chances of it dying?
So you have to be really careful what you divide it by the deaths, by the total number of known cases or the total number of potential and and that's a really really hard number to get a handle on because unlike Stars one, where you had your incubation period, and then you had your symptomatic period, and then you
could transmit. With Stars two, you could start transmitting right away, even before you have any symptoms, or at least we think so, we don't know exactly when, but you're asymptomatic period can last, or incubation period can last up to two weeks on average seven six seven days, but up to two weeks, and as far as we know, people can transmit before they're symptomatic, So that means it's a lot harder to get a handle on. So when people report cases, that could be as long as fourteen days
after they've been capable of transmitting to other people. So the estimate of the reproductive rate of the virus is pretty high. That it's varying from any one individual could infect two others up to four others, and in some places, in closed settings like nursing homes or cruise ships, the transmission the reproductive rate of the virus has been even higher, way higher. Yeah, so on the order of measles higher, which has a reproductive rate of twelve to eighteen.
Okay, so quick recap. The reproductive rate means how many other folks an infected person could spread it to so spreading an airborne disease to twelve to eighteen others. Yeah, there's a reason that measles vaccines are a good idea. Now, the flu's reproduction rate is about one point three, meaning if you've got it, you'll give it to about one point three people, and SARS COVID two is estimated at about two point two, but it's still pretty early right now.
As of March ninth, twenty twenty, there have been one hundred and thirteen thousand reported cases of COVID nineteen and about half of those, say two two thousand, are fully recovered. Three thousand, eight hundred and ninety five people have died. So remember that rate of reproduction for SARS CoV two can vary a lot depending on the close corners, and some folks are in living situations that put them at greater risk.
So people are concerned because we don't know how many infections are out there that could be transmitting, and when we report cases, we're really only getting the tip of the iceberg. We don't know how big the base of the iceberg is, So that's why we're trying to prepare ourselves for it. You describe the epidemic curve in China. We know we can look back and trace the epidemic curve. We know that it started that the low levels of
cases started in the end of December. We actually can use genetic information to predict the origins of that human form, and it's looking like mid to end of November that this ancestral virus was around the one that's causing COVID nineteen. We started to detect the cases December thirtieth. We started to see growing cases through January, big boost through Chinese New Year's and we are peaking through February and finally
we're hitting the top of the curve. And now if you look at the cumulative cases, it's starting to level off, and if you're looking at the number of new cases per day, it's starting to go back down the other side. Oh okay, And this whole thing in China, at least from ramping up to hitting the peak to going down the other side has taken about two months or so
two and a half months. So the big question here in the US is when we will start to hit that curve and start to really increase exponentially in terms of the number of cases that we detect, and then how high that curve will go. Will it be as intense as it was in China or will we use different methodologies to keep it flatter? And if we flatten the curve, will that make the curve last longer?
So if you look at overall COVID nineteen cases, the curve starts off small and then goes skyward, and it still headed skyward. That's overall global. But if you look at just mainland China, where most of the cases have originated, it reached a peak and it's starting to cruise to the right instead of going straight up. So where can you get COVID nineteen data? I'll put links to these sources on next strain and get hub at alleywar dot com, slash ology, slash virology. But where can you get COVID
nineteen itself? And now where is it? Is it on door handles? Is it on airplane trays?
Like?
Where is it? And how do we not get it right?
So this is what we call a virus that transmits by airborne droplets. There has been some evidence of vecal fecal transmission, so it has been found in those kinds of body products. Yeah, but when we say airborne droplets, that basically means that it's in the water droplets that we produce when we sneeze or cough, or if we're rubbing our eyes, nose, and mouth and then depositing or
capturing a cough and depositing those on surfaces. So wherever the droplets land or are put by our hands, for example, is where the virus could be picked up by the next host. So that's different from something like measles, which is truly airborne and can actually float in the air as an aerosol, and that's why measles can potentially, if you don't get vaccinated, can be highly highly transmissible. So this is not measles. It's not fully aerosolized and airborne.
It's probably most likely to infect people through being coughed on directly, have droplets land on you directly, or you pick up the virus from a surface.
And then you rub your eyes or rub your nose and it gets into a mup.
Or you hold your hamburger and you take a big bite and your hands have touched the burger. So it's basically any potential surface that you have touched with your hands or other body part that then you introduce to any of your own mucus membranes warm, moist. When viruses deposit things on surfaces, we call those phonemtes FO M I E S. So I'm fondly referring to my iPhone
as a phoneite. So you can imagine right that potentially I'm handling the phone, I'm putting it down places other people might be picking it up, like my daughter or something. So clearly as a precaution that we can all take is to wash our hands before we use our hands to touch our mucus membranes like our eyes or nose or mouth or food that we're gonna put in our mouth, okay, and cover your cough or sneeze, because you don't want
to be a spreader. And remember we could be walking around without symptoms and be spreading the virus.
And our phones are disgusting, right, They're disgusting, Okay, Like keyboards and microscopes and doorknobs and elevator buttons.
So avoiding touching any of those really common surfaces is just a great thing.
Just a side note, I love how she said common everyday items like keyboards and doorknobs and elevator buttons and phones and microscopes. Is this amazing lady a molecular epidemiologist or what? Okay, So that is good to know that, Like, it's not that your phone might be disgusting, Like your phone is dirtier than like has more living on it than a toilet's eat or something, right, something insanely.
I would not be So yeah, okay, I think that is probably very true.
And how long it can can the virus that causes COVID nineteen starts to how long can it live just hanging out on your phone hanging out on a button?
So I actually don't know, and I don't know if I was looking in the published literature for that information and I didn't see a study. I've heard people in the press or maybe casually mentioned different times like twenty four hours, thirty six hours with flu. With influenza, it can persist over for twenty four hours or more, but it's a totally different virus, and it depends on the temperature.
So actually flu does really well. It persists longer when it's cool and dry, which is one of the reasons why influenzas does well in dry winters. In the temperate zone when we're crowded together indoors and they're living in these cool, dry environments. We don't know enough about stars Kov two to really know, but for sure, I would not doubt that it could persist a goodly amount of time. But we don't really know exactly how long that is, at least I don't.
Okay, so we're about to get to more common quandaries we're all facing. And you know, I usually do your Patreon questions, but I had no idea I was doing this episode until about one minute before, so I just played it by ear. Also, for each episode, we donate to a charity of the cologists choosing, and this week it went directly to the California Academy of Sciences. In the mission of the California Academy of Sciences is to explore, explain,
and sustain life. They have one point five million visitors every year, forty six million scientific specimens and collections. They do scientific research, public engagement, environmental literacy programs, and sustainability education. Plus it's just a really great, fun, beautiful museum of science. California Academy of Science is awesome. So a donation goes straight to them. Thanks to these sponsors. All right, back
to what I think would have been your questions. What do you think of the runs on hand sanitizer and hand sanitizer and Amazon being like two hundred dollars and you cannot buy a chlorox wipe anywhere they're all sold out. Have you stocked up? Do you have a bunker full of canned food? What's going on? No?
No, no, no. I think just like anything we could potentially get, whether it's seasonal flu or coronavirus or rhinovirus, a common called virus, it's I think plenty to wash your hands and soap and water is just fine. You don't need an ethanol based hand sanitizer. An ethanol based hand sanitizer doesn't hurt either. I mean, it's not a substitute for washing your hands with soap and water. Washing your hands with soap and water is better. But hand
sanitizer is fine, but it's not necessary. If you touch something, just go wash your hands as soon as you can before you touch your mucus, and you'll be fine. We don't have to like carry hand sanitizer in every pocket in every car. You can also make your own disinfectant for surfaces. Or you can just use soap and water on surfaces. So soap and water on surfaces, or any cleaner that's sixty percent ethanol or more. You can you know, buy rubbing alcohol from Oh, I hope I didn't just start.
Okay, but heads up, don't use straight rubbing alcohol on your hands or you might cause a skin burn or drying or cracking. Now some folks are trying to make their own hand sanitizer. They're just going full they pinterest mode, using two thirds rubbing alcohol and a third aloveragel to moisturize. But experts are like yo, if you get the concentration wrong or you contaminate it using non sterile tools to make it, it's not going to be as effective as
store bought, So don't bother. Can I douse my myths in whiskey? You ask, as long as I'm holed up drinking it hoping not to die. Well, first off, have some water, my friend. Also, whiskey is in high enough proof. Either is vodka. Tito's Vodka responsibly discouraged, hoarding and tweeted out. Per the CDC, hand sanitizer needs to contain at least sixty percent alcohol, Tito's handmade vodka is forty percent alcohol and therefore does not meet the current recommendation of the CDC.
So I'm sorry to say you cannot fix things by splashing boots on your body. I know it's disappointing.
And you can also make surface cleaner out of bleach. I have a lab here. I disinfect surfaces with seventy percent ethanol or ten percent bleach. But it turns out you could get away with three percent bleach. Wow, a three percent bleach solution. Just make sure you leave things wet. You don't dry them off right away.
Because that bleach needs time to break down.
The stilltime. Yeah, and same with ethanol wipes. So if you're buying wipes, make sure that they're still wet when you're using them. Don't use them till they dry out.
Right and don't use it and then dry it off with a dirty towel. Set good point. Let's take a moment to revisit the disinfectiology episode with doctor Evan Rumberger, who is a bleach chemist at Clorox in Northern California. He has dedicated his career to killing gross stuff that can make us sick. Now, how is bleach disinfecting things.
So some research that came out only about a decade ago zeroed in on the house and according to a study published in Cell magazine, the active ingredient and bleach causes proteins in bacteria and viruses to unfold in the same way that a fever would fight in infection. When you spray it first on the counter, you can leave it there to kick some bacterial and viral assets for like five to ten minutes, depending on your counter. And
what about the smell of bleach. I learned on the lab trip that the more bleach you smell, the more it's kind of busting up cell walls. Is that true?
Yeah, that's true. So it's like the bleach. You know, that bleach smell is.
Simmers.
A lot of them love it because it's it's a good indication of coming into a clean bathroom. I can I can tell you nothing better than going into like at the ballgame and going into the bathroom and if you smell bleach in there, it's like okay, okay, we can go in here or at a restaurant. That's that's a really good side. I'm just knowing how well how well
it works at disinfecting and that smell yours. It is the smell of the bleach kind of fragmenting up the things that comes in content that is a little bit of what you're smelling. That that's a nice queue, that it's done its thing.
It's good to know. So the next time you think it smells like bleach in here, think well, wow, it smells like a lot of destroyed pathogens and ripped apart viruses. Aromatherapy in these trying times. And now back to virologist doctor Shannon Bennett, and what about symptoms. I know that some people can be asymptomatic. My fear because I travel a lot, Like I was on a plane this morning, I'll be on one tomorrow. My parents are have armed you compromised, and I'm afraid I'm supposed to see them
in like two weeks. And I'm like, what if I pick it up and I don't know and I give it to them? Like right? We all know, or not all of us, but a lot of us know that, like those masks aren't doing anything, Like right, what do we do?
So? I too have an older mother that has asthma, and I certainly wouldn't ever want to give her this. So it's like I said, it's not measles where it's going to fly through the air, but they're definitely you know, droplets can travel about six feet, so if you've developed symptoms, clearly you would want to avoid contact with them close contact. But before you develop symptoms, if you don't have symptoms, you're not coughing, so you're probably potentially depositing fo mites around.
So just like we can use good hygiene to protect ourselves, you can also use good hygiene not to transmit. So if you're washing your hands frequently, not only are you not liable to give it to yourself, but if you did touch your face and hands, wash your hands again. Wash your hands before you prepare food. Don't cups, glasses, straws with your family members, like we should all not do that right now, it would be good. And don't cough.
Cover your coughs or sneezes, even if they're just starting with a tickle to try to cover.
Is it better to have Kleenex with you or to have like a handkerchief.
I have a young daughter fourteen, and when she was growing up, it was the Batman move, like pull your pull your arm up and sneeze into your elbow or cough into your elbow. There is some interesting rumors going around about whether the virus can persist on fabric surfaces. So, for sure, we know that can persist on hard surfaces, but how does it persist on fabrics, So that I think is still up for question if it would persist
longer on a handkerchief or on your sleeve. So maybe the best course is to use a disposable kleenex, throw it out, wash your hands.
Okay, okay, rapid fire paper towels or hand dryers.
So I'm a big fan of paper.
Towels, got it. What about the internet rumor that Sar's corona too is an escaped bio warfare pathogen from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They have the same outfit that we have in terms of they have that Chinese version of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that Chinese CDC, and that the rumor out there, and I don't want to repeat the rumor in case it's propagated, but you know, the rumor was that they might have been involved. Of course, many labs, especially government labs, are going to keep you know pathogens
and cell cultures and different things to study things. So it's completely plausible that all of the labs around that support us and develop vaccines and drugs have some forms of these things to study. I don't put any stock into the rumor at all, and the genetic evidence supports that it's not an engineered virus.
PS. If you hear the word recombination in regard to this or other viruses, don't get scared of a term you don't know. It just means that a few viruses can mix up their DNA, coinfecting the same host and
exchanging genetic segments. So recombination in SARS CoV two may have been because there were multiple animal hosts, not because someone in China is trying to start the apocalypse, Rumors spread by Rush Limbaugh in Info Wars Alex Jones, the letter of whom had a self described form of psychosis and convinced people that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. Jones stated recently that SARS CoV two is the work of Chinese communists and that it's man made sentiments that
manage to be not only racist, but sexist too. Now, Trevor Bedford is a Seattle based virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and has done amazing work on the genomics of SARS CoV two. And he has a thread debunking these conspiracy theories. It's on Twitter. It's definitely worth a read. I'll link it on my website at Aliward dot com slash ology, slash virology. And also, while you're at it, just follow him on Twitter at trv band And for the health of yourself and the planet,
stop following potato face hate mongers. Speaking of faces, what about.
Masks, So masks, masks are not all equal. There are many kinds of masks out there. There are paper masks that are not necessarily adequately filtering the air, and then there are masks with these little built in filters, and the rest of the mask is more is less much less permeable, and they're called N ninety fives. Ninety five refers to the amount of air it filters the amount of particulates it filters out of the air, So N
ninety five means it filters ninety of the particles. So in a healthcare setting where you are in a crowded space and droplets are flying, they are definitely recommending, and ninety fives or higher and ninety nine's be used by healthcare professionals by people that are in closed spaces where they cannot escape a flying droplet because of this whole six foot rule and where they're concentrated and crowded with people. For most of us going about our day to day,
we're probably picking the virus up, mostly from fomites. A mask is not going to protect you from fomites. And this is not measles. Where it's flying through the air. You're going to know if you're within six feet of somebody that's spraying droplets. So the mask won't help for fomites. Unless I guess some people could argue, if I'm wearing a mask, I'm not touching my face. But I bet you if you're wearing a mask, you're touching your face
even more because you're adjusting the those piece. And not only that, but people need to understand that all the masks that are available, most of them are disposable. That means to use them properly. You fit them tight, and you use them once and then you throw them out, so they themselves could become fonts of fomite just by collecting the foemites that you're breathing through the air and
then you're touching them. And so they're not a great idea, Yeah, unless you're in a healthcare setting right where you will be in very close quarters with direct droplets.
And I've read that even people who use those in a healthcare setting have to do tests to make sure that it's fitted properly. And they're easy to use wrong.
They're easy to use wrong, they're easy to use over and over again, and they could give you this false sense of security going into a situation when if it hasn't been fitted properly and there are gaps, you're actually pulling in more virus then if you didn't, and.
Then there's not enough for the people who need them for.
And the last thing they want is for there to be a run on masks and the people that are really exposed not having access to them.
Yeah, just a side note.
The US Search in General tweeted an exasperated plea that started with, Seriously, people stop buying masks. They're not effective in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus. But if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients. It puts them in our communities at risk.
End quote.
So what if you bought them when you thought you needed them, and now you feel bad or embarrassed about it. Don't be embarrassed. Just contact a local healthcare provider or er let them know you have clean, unused masks to donate. Medshare dot org is also taking and redistributing them. And I fly a lot. We all know this, and I was on two planes this week for work and I saw a ton of people wearing these vented and ninety five numbers. It's kind of like a Gucci purse. Once
you know what it is, you see them everywhere. Also, in researching this episode, guess what all my targeted website ads are for? Yep, even the New York Times sidebar ads are for n ninety five masks enhance sanitizers. If you've been googling coronavirus a lot. So when it comes to widespread panic, there's really no escaping commerce. Now, speaking of escaping, I was supposed to give a talk It's south by Southwest ETU this week, but it was canceled.
What do you think.
About this particular disease being an excuse to stop going to parties.
My daughter's like, when are they going to close school?
What are they going to close school?
So I, for one, am not changing my social gathering, but I'm being mindful of the social distancing so that the difference is that I am not necessarily shaking hands, hugging, kissing, or you know, sharing a drink with someone like I might you know, do in a party like I'll have AI. Can I taste your wine or your cocktail? So those things are definitely good things to not do at this time.
But I think still at this point I think social gathering is is we don't have enough indication that the base of the iceberg is so huge that we should stop gathering socially.
What about say trips, Like I know I'm going to Costa Rica. So far no cases in Costa Rica, but I'm going in a couple of months. But one patron, one listener who's a friend of mine, doctor Tiaginwall, she has had part of a lung remove because of valley fever, and she's planning on going to Hawaii with her sixty six year old dad, and she's like, should I not go? I have like a pre existing lung thing She's like, am I being paranoid?
Yeah?
What do you think do people keep traveling?
I think the first thing she should do is talk to her medical Yeah, for sure, for sure, right, So I'm not going to say, and they've got her own lungs, but yeah, absolutely. Whenever you travel and you go transit through airports, you're passing many many more people from many many more places, and you are potentially exposing yourself to foe mites and coughs. And then again, if you're in
an airplane, it's not like masles Is. There can be flying around the cabin, but if the person beside you, behind you, or in front of you is coughing actively, there's that. So again, I think being mindful that if you do travel, you need to be ultra careful about touching your eyes, nose, and mouth or food with unwashed hands, and distancing yourself and from contact with other humans it's
direct contact. So I personally am still traveling. I have a wonderful trip plan to do field research in the Maldives at the end of March, March twenty seventh, I'm really really hoping that I can go. Really, what I'm saying about that is I'm looking to the CDC and following their travel advisories. So if they have issued a travel advisory against a place, and they have issued travel advisories to what they're classifying as Level three countries, yes,
don't go. I'm not gonna go, and you risk if you do go, maybe not being able to get back as readily.
LEUS.
Many airlines are are canceling some percentage of flights. So so looking to the WHO and CDC guidelines for travel advisories based on destination is the what I am doing, and then using safe personal precautions when I do travel to non level three locations.
Okay, I wonder do you think that Olympics are going to be next?
Well, I think that that is what everybody's.
Talking everyone's talking about that.
Yeah. So actually I was just looking at the data in Japan and they still have not hit the top of their curve. Okay, So China has and it's heading down the other side. Japan has not quite So depending on how it all rolls, by the time the Summer Olympics occur, it could be down the other side, right and they could be starting to pull up, pull up, pull up. So we have many events here planned at the Academy. We're just keeping an eye on the data
and not making any premature decisions. And you know, like I said, with diseases, they come in a wave, and the wave peaks and then it goes back down again.
What causes that drop?
Actually, you know, that's a very good question. Most people assume that all the people in a certain population that could have gotten it at a certain efficiency that the virus might exhibit, got it. So we're kind of thinking about it as like a herd immunity. Somehow the population of at risk, potentially exposed people is that population isn't large enough to sustain ongoing virus transmission for whatever reason.
And there's lots of things that might determine that. In China, it was concentrated in Wuhan, Probably many people that could have been exposed were exposed. And the virus is now running out of running rim Like many kids are not showing symptoms, maybe they're not on the re So people that are going to get it that would have showed that they got it is starting to run down. So what we don't know is what the United States is
going to look like. We don't know if we're going to have a bell shaped epidemic curve in a given place or whether it'll be across the whole country. So for example, for sure in Seattle, there's definitely a curve going up and coming back down. But it could be that we at a country level stay with these sort of very discrete events like that, and we never as a country go through a curve where the virus never nationally runs out of susceptibles, essentially, and.
Quick aside in case you're like, what's going on in Seattle, Well, the first US case of COVID nineteen appeared outside of Seattle, when a thirty five year old man who had recently traveled to huan China came back with it, and as of this recording, nearly one hundred folks have been diagnosed and eighteen have died in the Seattle area. Somehow spread to a nursing care facility in Kirkland, Washington, causing the deaths of thirteen residents and spreading to a suspected half
of its one hundred and eighty workers. Although the center is having trouble getting a hold of enough testing kits, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up and donated one hundred million dollars to global public health authorities to try and fight COVID nineteen, starting with trying to make testing kits available to Seattle area residents. So why you might ask, if you are my parents who just asked me as I was researching, are older folks more
risk for this? And why haven't we seen COVID nineteen in kits? So A few theories are that as we age, our immune systems just are not as strong and our inflammatory response may be greater, causing that cytokine storm that can cause organ problems. So obviously no one wants to get this and no one wants to give this to anyone. So what do you do if you feel like garbage? Are there even enough testing kits available right now?
Em?
Not really Now. The CDC recommends in any case to call a healthcare provider immediately and they will assess your symptoms. Also have a working thermometer available, because a low grade fever is one of those symptoms. Now, for mild symptoms, CDC says stay at home and isolate, don't spread it to your family, and for worsening symptoms, alert your doctors so that if you do come in they're prepared with
the right testing kits and their own precautionary measures. Don't just saunter in to urgent care unannounced like a mother in law doing a drop by on a Sunday. Give them a heads up first. Also, a healthy immune system is important, so take your vitamin see, stay hydrated with not vodka, get a lot of sleep. You have waited years to have a good excuse to stay in and watch Netflix and nap. You're welcome. Also, if you need a show to watch, can I suggest One hundred Humans,
which premieres on March thirteenth. If you're bored, tweet to Netflix and tell them you love it. Also, take care of your immune system. Do you think our immune systems will eventually get hip to it or do you think that eventually they'll have a vaccine in a couple of months or is it just like wash your hands. The vaccines are not going to come fast enough.
Well, two things. One is that it does take time to develop a vaccine. There are vaccine candidates that are being researched right now and they look promising, but to get that through drug testing and everything could take months to a year. So stay tuned. But The other question too, is how effective a vaccine will be. And with influenza, we know that that immunity does wane, it doesn't match anymore, and it's not as effective, whereas with some things like measles,
the vaccine's awesome and it lasts decades. Right, So it really depends, and all viruses are different, and the kind of antibodies they lisit in the human body that could then be leveraged to boost people give people a vaccine as still completely unknown with this virus. I mean there's candidates, but there's not there's not enough information.
So a lot of companies are urging workers to telecommute, which I think is a great idea. Personally, I will be doing that as much as possible, and perhaps so should you if your job situation lends itself to that, which is a privilege in and of itself. But so so many people simply cannot afford to take off work and can't telecommute because their job involves being on site to teach or to build something, or to serve something
or fix something. And for them, it's good to be mindful to try to cut this thing off because some people can't take certain steps to lower their risk. Oh and if you're wondering if your dog can spread it to you or others, the World Health Organization says, nah, but you should wash your hands after penning animals.
Anyway.
They said nothing about telling your animals how beautiful they are from across the room, which I've been doing. Okay, you know what, let's try to like in this uplot the movie Contagion, yes or no? Any virus movies that you actually like.
I actually kind of like Outbreak. It's a lot cornier, but I love Dustin Hoffmann. Okay, that's I was like, I think those are all really super Fund remain called.
Many people are dying and are going to continue to die unless we find this monkey. So Jarrett was being an angel and helping me as I was scrambling to put this episode together, and this Outbreak clip made him rip off his headphones and tell me I needed to contact my favorite disastrologist, doctor Samantha Montano from the Disastrology episode immediately. Now it was ten pm her time on a Sunday. I gently texted her and she was up and down to chat on the phone, because, as her
Twitter bio states, she's not just a disastrologist. She's a cool disastrologist, so I asked her, what the hell should we do? Should we panic? Okay, doctor Montana, thank you so much for talking to me. You're welcome in this COVID nineteen fear and scare and threat. What do you suggest that people know or do?
Sure?
So, the first thing that I recommend is that folks listen to the information being put out by their local public health and emergency management officials. They'll be the agencies that have the most up to date information for your specific area, and so following their advice is your best bet.
Where do people find their local emergency management officials?
Good question.
So the best thing to do is to just go to Google and search the name of your city, town, or county with emergency management and or public health, and you should have an agency come up. They're all named slightly different, so you kind of have to just search around for it. But once you find their websites, you should be able to find a place to sign up for email or text alerts, or at least their social media so you can follow them on there.
I did this for a Los Angeles side note, and it pulled up the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the California Department of Public Health, the CDC, the World Health Organization sweet So think locally first, see what's happening nearby, Okay, and should we be taking this as the apocalypse is coming? Or is this just a new disease and so people are just being very precautious.
Well I would definitely not say it is the apocalypse, fortunately, but you know, this is something that needs to be taken very seriously. So remember that kind of for the majority of people you know that are taking precautions, they're doing so not for yourself.
But rather for the people around you who are at a higher risk, people who have, you.
Know, certain chronic illnesses or our elderly and have those higher risks.
We want to make sure that we're not doing anything to spread this around to them.
So you're not a diva or high maintenance. If you're being extra precautious, you're just being kind of kind and compassionate and empathetic to others. Yes, absolutely, are guys going to start washing their hands? Do you think I would really hope. So that's been one thing that has been quite illuminating. How many guys on Twitter are like, oh, yeah, a lot of guys just cruised right out of the bathroom without washing their hands. How about that?
Yeah, it's disgusting.
And then what about kind of a little bit of the panic or the fear? What should what should people do emotionally?
Yeah, so I think the most important thing is to just remember to be kind to each other. There's a lot of really confusing and conflicting information flying around, and this is very genuinely scary for a lot of people. And so, you know, I think we want to be careful when we see people taking certain actions that to us may seem slightly or irrational, or may seem like they're making a decision out of panic. It's important to
remember that we don't necessarily know their individual situation. We don't understand, you know, who they're living with at home, who may be high risk, what particular needs their family may have, And so we want to be kind of careful about how we're interpreting some behaviors that kind of from the outside or with more information or more accurate information, may seem irrational, are actually relatively rational reactions for them.
That's such a good point, because you don't know if someone's imm compromised, or if they're caring for something who is, and so don't judge people for being cautious.
Exactly.
How do you feel about people who are are stockpiling canned food and water and pure ol? Do you think there's a need to get ready for maybe mandatory quarantines or what should we do?
Yeah?
So, I think the general consensus coming out of official agencies is that there is a recommendation that folks have a supply of food at their homes. The kind of general consensus seems to be two weeks worth. That again, is gonna kind of look different for different people's situations.
I think really the ideal with that is if you are in a position.
Where you need to stay home for multiple weeks and it's not safe for you to leave your house, that you are able to feed yourself.
That said, you know, emergency managers.
On a daily basis recommend that you have multiple days worth of food and water in your house for any disaster that may occur.
So that's pretty standard advice.
If you didn't already have that, that might be why you're heading out to get it now, right Exactly? What about big events being canceled or postponed. I know that in some countries' weddings are being postponed or banned. Gatherings of over a thousand people. I know south By Southwest just canceled. Good call. Do you think.
It really depends on where you are.
It's a situation where we don't necessarily have all of the data that we would ideally want to be able to make the most informed decisions. This happens a lot during disasters, and so officials are needing to make decisions kind of based on the best information that they have. Presumably they're making those decisions based on information that they've been given by local public health officials, and so that's, you know, a good approach.
Yeah, that's so smart and helpful. I don't know about you, but I've had some stuff get canceled that I've been like, yes.
Seconds stamp, that's funny.
I'm actually going to a conference tomorrow in Hawaii and it has not been cancellable, and it's been very shocking.
I thought for sure it would be.
I hope you have some hand wipes, Yes, I do. Okay, Well, I hope you fly safe. Send updates from paradise.
I will do all right.
Doctor Montano, thank you so much. Wash your hands you too, Okay, Doctor Shannon Bennett had to jet, so we wrapped it up, and I know you got to go to a next meeting. I'll ask you the last two questions. I always ask worst thing about your job, crappiest thing about it. I know that you. I'm asking this of someone who has had malaria and dysentery in a leper colony during a war. But what's the worst thing about your job? It could be anything.
So so I'm actually a dual role right now I'm doing. I'm the chief of science at the Academy as well as an ologist, virologists and malec demiologists, And so I would say that the administrative parts of my job like that. And even as an ologist, you have these administrative duties like writing reports and writing grants that can that is I do find tedious. But doing the actual research, the field work, so the administrative part of it is a little painful. That's what I like the least.
So amazing that you could have.
It's part of your job, but the paperwork is worse. I get it, I get it.
I mean you could get dysentery from anything.
Really Oh my god, what's your favorite thing about what you do?
So that exactly the adventure of going out into the field.
I love that part.
I just love seeing new places and seeing new people, and I the feeling of discovery that I might catch a mosquito that contains a droplet of blood that it took from some obscure animal and nature that might have the secret to a new virus that I could discover is so exciting. And we've discovered new viruses and it's
really incredible. And then bringing that secret information back into the lab and cracking open the genome and solving it and doing the analysis and looking at the family tree of these viruses and how they relate to each other is my absolute favorite thing ever.
Thank you so so much for doing this. So in essence, just wash your hands. Calm down a little bit, right.
Wash your hands. Social distance, stay home if you're sick. Like a lot of people, we're in this culture where we think I will just tough it out.
Oh I won't affect anybody.
I'll just go to work anyway. But this is not the time to be tough. Right to stay home if you're sick.
Got it, We'll do Thank you.
Doctor, thank you so much for doing this.
So, folks, this is potentially very serious. Not gonna let you, but it can be potentially contained faster. Not with panic. Panic never saved anyone, but preparedness, conscientiousness, compassion, empathy, and handwashing have saved lives. And as someone who has loved ones who are immunocompromised, I'm hoping people stay home when
they can. We all just do our best to hunker down and let this thing pass over us with a curve that doesn't look like a six flags attraction, I myself will be laying low more than I usually do. And what did we learn? Ask smart people stupid questions and don't touch them or your face. Don't touch their face either.
Now.
Doctor Shannon Bennett is on Twitter and Instagram at Microbe Explorer and we are at ologies on both. I'm at Ali Ward with one l on both again. Also, One hundred Humans premieres on Netflix March thirteenth. We've been working on the show for a couple of years and Sammy obeyed in zeb Johnson. My co hosts and comedians are great and wonderful and you will love them and I hope it gets you through some self imposed isolation for safety.
Now.
Links to all the good stuff we talked about will be at aliword dot com, slash ologies slash virology, and I'm going to put that link in the show notes. And ologi'es merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Felts and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. They also have a comedy podcast called You Are That, which is great Aaron Telbert admin's Theologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you Emily White and all the volunteer Ologies transcribers for
keeping these episodes accessible. Transcripts are available. I'll put a link in the show notes where you can get transcripts and bleeped episodes for kids in the show notes for free. If you ever need to hire a transcriptionist, email hire Emily White at gmail dot com. She is incredible. Thank you to you assistant editor Jared Sleeper of Mindjmmedia and the podcast My Good Bad Brain for helping put all
these clips together. And of course huge thanks to editor Steven Ray Morris of the dino podcast c Jurassic Rights and the kitty themed Procast for stitching it all together like one big, sloppy genome. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the show, you know I tell you a secret. This week's secret is that I have seen a lady walk out of the bathroom maybe twice in my life without washing her hands. I've witness this, honestly, maybe twice,
and both times it was like seeing a ghost. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was like, she's cruised right out of here, not even any water on her paws. And I went back to my table at the restaurant. I told everyone so, this entire COVID nineteen situation has truly alerted me to how much weird sad machismo prevents boys from washing their hands. So, boys, we love you, don't let it kill you. We just respectfully ask you
to please wash your myths. As our friends the Doctor's Aaron's Welch and Almond Nupdyke from this podcast will kill you say, wash your hands. You're filthy animals. Also, I want you to know that if you eat a lot of goat yogurt, sometimes your pit smell like goats the next day. It's so weird. Has that ever happened to you? But goat Yogurt's so good. Okay, bye bye pack Aderman's College Theology or doo Zoology, Lithology in Technology, meteorology, pertology, nythology, seriology, stelenology.
Oh we gonna come choking, not gonna hate up a thousands atholtics.
And that's asie.
Why why why why
Bye Corona