Speaker 1: Oh hey, just a quick preamble, a little update. Today
Speaker 1: is March eighteenth. This was recorded just about a week ago,
Speaker 1: not that long ago at all, but already go a
Speaker 1: lot of updates. And I just want to let you
Speaker 1: know that I reached out to doctor Shannon Bennett and
Speaker 1: asked if she had anything else she wanted to let
Speaker 1: us know, just as a quick update on this, and
Speaker 1: she said, quote daily, new confirmed cases are growing in
Speaker 1: number exponentially here in the US. And that is in
Speaker 1: light of one of the lowest per capita testing rates
Speaker 1: worldwide by country. That's twenty six tests per million people
Speaker 1: as of March tenth. And that means that even though
Speaker 1: we all recognize that confirmed cases are just the tip
Speaker 1: of the iceberg of actual infections, in the US, our
Speaker 1: iceberg is particularly submerged. In short, it's time to take
Speaker 1: social distancings seriously and flatten the curve. So this episode
Speaker 1: will tell you what you need to know about COVID nineteen,
Speaker 1: how it spreads, how it affects the human body, and
Speaker 1: why it's so important right now to isolate. So if
Speaker 1: you are isolating social distance, seeing staying in, staying out
Speaker 1: at the bars, we can do this y'all, I myself
Speaker 1: haven't left the house since Thursday. It's very cozy. So
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to this, thanks for staying informed. And
Speaker 1: here is the broadcast that came out on March tenth.
Speaker 1: Stay safe, wash your hands. Oh hey, it's your friend
Speaker 1: who washes her hands roughly five times more often than
Speaker 1: she did last week. Allie Wood back with a spech
Speaker 1: ep of ologies. So this episode is coming out March tenth,
Speaker 1: and it was not even conceived of until a few
Speaker 1: days ago. But guess what we need it. I wanted it,
Speaker 1: we made it. So pass it on to anyone who
Speaker 1: needs a distillation of what the hell is going on
Speaker 1: and how much we should be freaking out. It's fascinating,
Speaker 1: its informative. I'm so glad these ologists were available. But first,
Speaker 1: kind of a secret up top. I mentioned last year
Speaker 1: as a secret at the end of an episode that
Speaker 1: I was shooting a new show for Netflix, And y'all,
Speaker 1: it finally comes out this week on March thirteenth, this Friday.
Speaker 1: It's called one hundred Humans, and it's bananas. We got
Speaker 1: one hundred people who represent the demographics of the United States,
Speaker 1: and alongside social psychologists and statisticians ran them through experiments
Speaker 1: to see if people are more biased than they than
Speaker 1: they are, and if having fun makes you more productive,
Speaker 1: and if the placebo effect works in New age SPA
Speaker 1: treatments and what age group could build furniture the fastest.
Speaker 1: It's wild. It's out March thirteenth. It's on Netflix. Please
Speaker 1: do watch it. Tweet about it. The hashtag is one
Speaker 1: hundred humans. Okay. Also, thank you to everyone who has
Speaker 1: ever contributed to patreon dot com slash ologies and made
Speaker 1: the show possible. Thanks everyone who's out there where in
Speaker 1: ologies merch, and for everyone who boosts the show and
Speaker 1: keeps it up among the science giants, just by rating
Speaker 1: it and making sure you're subscribed and texting links to
Speaker 1: your friends like a virus. And of course those of
Speaker 1: you who review it for me to creep and weep,
Speaker 1: such as this week's from Booby rocks Out, who says
Speaker 1: a dear dad word, I'm ready because I have some
Speaker 1: rather big news I wanted to share with you. I
Speaker 1: got into grad school. That was all caps. Sorry to
Speaker 1: shout at you, but I'm just so very excited. Listening
Speaker 1: to your wild and wacky podcast inspired me to finally
Speaker 1: finally pursue my dream of a PhD. So thanks for
Speaker 1: that and all the hard work you do to show
Speaker 1: us that smart people are really just people like the
Speaker 1: rest of us, awkward, gross funny, suffering from imposter syndrome
Speaker 1: and all the rest. Booboo rocks out hell Yes to
Speaker 1: a botany related episode one day, Go get him. Also, listener,
Speaker 1: kg Demorst, happy to have put a scatological smile on
Speaker 1: your face. Okay, virology, we're in it. Let's get into it.
Speaker 1: I had planned to interview the director of Science at
Speaker 1: the California Academy of Sciences, this batite, brunette badass, doctor
Speaker 1: Shannon Bennett, for a colcidology episode about mosqueters and Skeeter
Speaker 1: diseases and malaria and Dengey fever and Zeka. And I
Speaker 1: arrived with your Patreon questions in hand, and as her
Speaker 1: wonderful assistant Andrew was walking me down the hallway. Hey Andrew,
Speaker 1: he mentioned that doctor Bennett had just given a talk
Speaker 1: to all the staff members at the cal Academy of
Speaker 1: Sciences about COVID nineteen. As she is a virologist, it
Speaker 1: is very up on the topic and the research and
Speaker 1: the outreach. Hot damn, I said, let's change this entire up.
Speaker 1: We're doing virology, which comes from the Latin virus meaning
Speaker 1: poisonous substance, which comes from the word for a sap
Speaker 1: of plants or a slimy liquid, a potent juice, which is,
Speaker 1: after all, what is dripping from our face openings, threatening
Speaker 1: to kill friend and foe alike. And we're all pretty
Speaker 1: scared and confused. Now. Because this is a really huge
Speaker 1: and important topic, I figured, let's make this kind of
Speaker 1: a bit of a salad with more than one ologist.
Speaker 1: Let's make it a speci app Let's get a little crazy.
Speaker 1: I also reached out to previous guests, including disastrologists doctor
Speaker 1: Samantha Montano. I sprinkled in some wisdom from disinfectanologist and
Speaker 1: bleach chemist doctor Evan Rumberger, and also touched base with
Speaker 1: beloved chiropterrologists doctor Merlin Tuttle about pointing our unwebbed fingers
Speaker 1: accusationally toward the batcaves. But the backbone of this special
Speaker 1: episode is doctor Shannon Bennett, who sat down for a
Speaker 1: full length chat about her work and this new novel virus.
Speaker 1: She's knowledgeable and passionate and addresses not only the genetics
Speaker 1: of the virus, but the symptoms and infection rate and
Speaker 1: prevention and testing, and how we should handle the fear
Speaker 1: and the seeming chaos of a pandemic and what these
Speaker 1: virus population curves mean. And if you're freaked out, that's okay,
Speaker 1: but you will leave it feeling armed and empowered, I promise.
Speaker 1: So wash your hands, calm your nerves, and feed your
Speaker 1: brains with this bonanza of Corona with four ologists folks,
Speaker 1: a disaster handler, a hygiene scientist, a batman, and, of course,
Speaker 1: chief of Science at the California Academy of Sciences, virologist
Speaker 1: doctor Shannon Bennett. Okay, I handed doctor Bennett at Mike
Speaker 1: and instantly apologized that she had to touch something I
Speaker 1: touched and we were off.
Speaker 2: I'm going to give you this.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry that it's okay. We'll just watched later. Sure
Speaker 3: we're impermeable, yes, right, yes, only if we take this
Speaker 3: and touch our eyes nose them out. We're washing.
Speaker 1: So we're said, that's a good point. I got to
Speaker 1: stop touching my face.
Speaker 3: Fifth, on average, fifteen times an hour and ninety times
Speaker 3: a day, we touch our face. Oh, we don't even
Speaker 3: know it Are you serious? Yeah, And I think it's
Speaker 3: part of our grooming heritage. You know, as primates, we
Speaker 3: groom and we're always grooming, and we just don't even
Speaker 3: know it.
Speaker 1: And we can't touch other people's faces right.
Speaker 3: Well, that you know. Socially we don't usually.
Speaker 2: Do that either, but okay, good to know.
Speaker 1: And you are a molecular epidemiologist, you are a virologist.
Speaker 1: You've got a lot of ologies under your belts.
Speaker 3: It's really fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how many? You also microbiology too?
Speaker 3: I call myself a microbiologist because I study viruses in
Speaker 3: the context of the rest of the microbial world they
Speaker 3: live in. And so virologist and microbiologist why not? Yeah,
Speaker 3: and molecular demiologist.
Speaker 1: And you've got a busy week. You've got a busy
Speaker 1: couple of weeks, haven't you.
Speaker 3: It's been very exciting.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, your work, I know has. You've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of your time looking at mosquitoes in malaria
Speaker 1: and dengey fever. And you, yourself, I understand, have not
Speaker 1: just been a doctor but also a patient in this right.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I think you really have to know your
Speaker 3: study organisms intimately. So what better way to do that
Speaker 3: than to be a host yourself. It was not done
Speaker 3: on purpose though, right part of the experience that led
Speaker 3: to my origin stories as an ologist.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me a little bit about like when
Speaker 1: did you start looking at things that our microscopes? When
Speaker 1: did you start wondering about how things jump from animals
Speaker 1: to humans? When did it all happen?
Speaker 3: Right? So I liked biology, I liked being outdoors. But
Speaker 3: outdoors and biology that's a huge scope of things you
Speaker 3: could focus on, and I have no focus. Until very
Speaker 3: late in my undergraduate program, I had an opportunity to
Speaker 3: go to West Africa and as a volunteer for the summer,
Speaker 3: and I worked with communities to talk about primary health
Speaker 3: care challenges but using theater. It was really interested in
Speaker 3: theater and as a teaching tool. And in the daytime
Speaker 3: I taught Grade five math and in the evenings I
Speaker 3: taught a theater program.
Speaker 1: Y'all, this ologist journey started because she was a theater
Speaker 1: nerd Oh my heart.
Speaker 3: And like every good citizen, I went to my public
Speaker 3: health professional and I got all the vaccines and antimallarial
Speaker 3: medicines that I needed, and six weeks later I had
Speaker 3: to Africa and within two weeks.
Speaker 1: I caught malaria.
Speaker 3: Oh, and everybody said, this malaria is resistant to all
Speaker 3: those anti malarias you Westerners are prescribing this mosquito worn parasite.
Speaker 1: It's not a virus.
Speaker 3: Malaria is caused by a parasite a U carry out
Speaker 3: really to us at the cellular level. It had evolved
Speaker 3: resistance and continues to evolve resistance very rapidly. So that
Speaker 3: was my first lesson. A things change, yes, then I
Speaker 3: so I was wrestling with malaria and the fever chills cycle.
Speaker 3: That is a hallmark of that pathogen. And I picked
Speaker 3: up amoebic dysentery. Oh yeah, so amoebic dysentery is caused
Speaker 3: by a little Also you carry out single celled animal
Speaker 3: and to amba histolytica. So it hisstalytica comes from the
Speaker 3: fact that it melts your tissues in your colon and
Speaker 3: your intestine and creates bloody ulcers. And so the first
Speaker 3: hallmark is you look and you see bloody stool. So
Speaker 3: I saw a lot of blood in my stool. I
Speaker 3: got a little concerned. Sure enough, I had amybic dysentery.
Speaker 3: Still wrestling with fever chills from malaria. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 3: so they shipped me off to a leper colony. Leprosy
Speaker 3: is caused by a bacterium.
Speaker 1: So they literally sent you to a leper.
Speaker 3: Colony only place to get nursing care.
Speaker 1: I thought that was like a perhaps an exaggeration, but no.
Speaker 3: It's true. I was hospitalized in a leper colony. They
Speaker 3: had nursing care there, and leprosy. Even though there's a
Speaker 3: lot of social stigma around leprosy, it actually is not
Speaker 3: very infectious. It's transmitted through families, so it can look infectious,
Speaker 3: just like coronavirus right now is being transmitted through families,
Speaker 3: but it turns out that it's a combination of long
Speaker 3: intimate exposure and genetic predisposition, so it's not very infectious.
Speaker 3: So it was perfectly fine for me to be hospitalized
Speaker 3: in a leper colony. It was a very very casual,
Speaker 3: pleasant experience. But I saw lots of evidence of people
Speaker 3: with leprosy or recovering from leprosy, and it typically causes
Speaker 3: your lower extremities to atrophy and drop off eventually, so
Speaker 3: that was interesting the understatement of the year. I had
Speaker 3: also picked up a skin infection while I was there,
Speaker 3: so we have microbes on our skin, a whole complement
Speaker 3: of them, and one of them is a Staphylococcus bacterium oh,
Speaker 3: which basically I had an open wound. I think it
Speaker 3: was a mosquito bite that I'd scratched, or maybe it
Speaker 3: was a cut on my leg, and it got infected
Speaker 3: with staff and I was getting spiky fevers from staff,
Speaker 3: so it striations down my leg and it was all
Speaker 3: very exciting. So I had a double triple whammy of
Speaker 3: two U carry outs and a bacterium, and then I
Speaker 3: was surrounded by a bacterial infection. So I had a
Speaker 3: lot of time to languish in the hospital. You were
Speaker 3: a hot mess and think about my plight and understand
Speaker 3: that things were out there all the time. They're either
Speaker 3: in human communities or non human communities. They're evolving, they're changing.
Speaker 3: I came out of it with kind of a new
Speaker 3: a deep appreciation and admiration were the incredible diverse world
Speaker 3: of microorganisms, whether they're viruses or bacteria or eukaryots, and
Speaker 3: what it was to be a host and what it
Speaker 3: was to be a parasite and conquer all these barriers.
Speaker 1: Right like a worthy adversary type of respect.
Speaker 3: They call it an arms race, and truly that's maybe
Speaker 3: not quite fair because they have us beat in terms
Speaker 3: of being able to evolve more rapidly and have more
Speaker 3: on the line.
Speaker 1: Right, So doctor Bennett says that viruses are under a
Speaker 1: lot of pressure to be really good at being effective parasites,
Speaker 1: whereas we have to defend ourselves against all kinds of things,
Speaker 1: not just these viruses, so we're outsmarted mostly in speaking
Speaker 1: of smarts. She went on to get her Bachelors of
Speaker 1: Science in biology from McGill University and her PhD in
Speaker 1: zoology from the University of British Columbia, but that was
Speaker 1: after she recovered from her hands on experience with pathogens
Speaker 1: and how did you keep your spirits up when you
Speaker 1: were in a leper colony with three diseases.
Speaker 3: It was incredibly inspiring to see people with leprosy making
Speaker 3: a positive contribution to their own lives, in each other's lives.
Speaker 3: It was a They called these leper colonies because they're
Speaker 3: ostracized and they basically they worked together. They have an economy,
Speaker 3: they were creating crafts, and they were innovating ways of
Speaker 3: sustainable farming before the rest of the world was even
Speaker 3: thinking about it, so, you know, caging animals over fish ponds,
Speaker 3: so the poop went fertilized the fishes, and then they
Speaker 3: had this sort of way of you know, keeping the
Speaker 3: whole thing going. So it was a very admirable approach
Speaker 3: to living with a disease. Yeah, and then while I
Speaker 3: was in the Leper colony, there was an attempted coup.
Speaker 3: This was in Liberia in nineteen eighty nine, so it
Speaker 3: was the first harbinger of the nineteen ninety one Civil War.
Speaker 3: So I was there, I was I heard all the gunshots,
Speaker 3: machine gun fire. I'm so, I don't have deep experience
Speaker 3: with firearms. Anyway, it was on such an intense scale
Speaker 3: that it was incredible. And it was while I was
Speaker 3: in the leper colony that I thought I was almost
Speaker 3: thankful for being there, thankful for being sick and in
Speaker 3: a lepar colony with all the stigma that implies. And
Speaker 3: they basically avoided us entirely, went through the village where
Speaker 3: it was definitely there were deaths and other atrocities of war,
Speaker 3: and we were completely isolated and protected from that.
Speaker 1: I was never complaining about anything again. Ever.
Speaker 3: Parasites saved my life, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: And Now, when it comes to viruses, is a virus
Speaker 1: a parasite? What is a virus? What does it look like?
Speaker 1: What are we dealing with?
Speaker 3: So I consider the term parasite, and many do as
Speaker 3: more of a way of life than it is a
Speaker 3: particular branch of the tree of life, because parasite literally
Speaker 3: means to dine at another's table. It comes from a
Speaker 3: Greek word. So it's really a way of making your
Speaker 3: way in the world, and it's evolved independently across many,
Speaker 3: many different groups of living organisms. Bacteria can be parasitic,
Speaker 3: viruses can be parasitic eukaryotes, and then across the tree
Speaker 3: of life, many different kinds of eukaryots can be parasitic,
Speaker 3: from single celled organisms like Giardia or antomium or plasmodium
Speaker 3: which causes malaria, all the way to nematodes and tapeworms
Speaker 3: and flatworms and all those great wormy stuff. So it's
Speaker 3: a way of life.
Speaker 4: It's a choice.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Arguably, many folks do not classify viruses themselves as living
Speaker 3: organisms because they kind of cheat and use the host
Speaker 3: cellular machinery to metabolize, is what everyone's dickering about. Oh
Speaker 3: but I consider them a life worm.
Speaker 1: What are the basic components of a virus and what's
Speaker 1: the difference between an RNA virus. It's like, what when
Speaker 1: you've got this spiky little glob coming to take over
Speaker 1: your life, what is it equipped with?
Speaker 3: So viruses are fairly simplified, but they're very diverse, and
Speaker 3: they're not even one single lineage. So when we talk
Speaker 3: about viruses, they probably arose multiple times, or if they didn't,
Speaker 3: and if they evolved from the same ancestor we can't
Speaker 3: track it back far enough in time to say one
Speaker 3: way or the other. They have a fairly simple structure,
Speaker 3: and it depends on which group of viruses you're talking about.
Speaker 3: The viruses I work on have a simple what we
Speaker 3: call a nucleocapsid sort of like a lipid bilayer membrane
Speaker 3: with proteins that stick off of it, and that membrane
Speaker 3: structure contains the genetic information of the virus, and then
Speaker 3: that's it. So genetic information, some kind of coating, and
Speaker 3: then some proteins that stick off the end. In the
Speaker 3: case of viruses that infect you caryotes, they use these
Speaker 3: proteins to bind to the host cell and then fuse
Speaker 3: into the host cell, past the host membrane into the
Speaker 3: cellular body of the host cell, and then that's where
Speaker 3: they pick up all this other you know, these other
Speaker 3: functions they need. They co op the host genome to
Speaker 3: make the building blocks that they need to replicate their genome.
Speaker 1: So imagine a double layer outside that has all these
Speaker 1: very fetching protein accessories that just stick on to your cells.
Speaker 1: Just bust into them and then hack your coating to
Speaker 1: make more of itself. It's slick, also impolite.
Speaker 3: And then depending on the kind of genome, and that too,
Speaker 3: is very diverse across the different viral groups. So there
Speaker 3: are viruses with double stranded DNA genomes like ours, and
Speaker 3: there are viruses with single stranded RNA genomes like the
Speaker 3: new novel coronavirus and the mosquito boring viruses I study,
Speaker 3: and the flavy Viridae family, which includes dngay and zika.
Speaker 1: Talking a little bit about the novel coronavirus, why is
Speaker 1: it called the novel coronavirus? Why is it COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: and how long have we even had an inkling that
Speaker 1: it existed?
Speaker 3: So it's gotten a new name. Now we got all
Speaker 3: on the same page, and we are calling it. The
Speaker 3: name officially is SARS coronavirus two a sequel, okay, So
Speaker 3: it's SARS stands for Severe Acute Respiratory syndrome virus so
Speaker 3: coronavirus CoV. And there was a STARS coronavirus. It emerged
Speaker 3: in late two thousand and two two thousand and three
Speaker 3: in Hong Kong via a wet market similar to this situation,
Speaker 3: and it's about eighty percent related to this coronavirus. So
Speaker 3: that's why we're calling it SARS coronavirus two.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: It has even closer relatives in known viruses that are
Speaker 3: out there in twenty fifteen twenty seventeen, some of those
Speaker 3: viruses are up to ninety six percent related to this virus.
Speaker 3: So in theory, we've known about this particular virus or
Speaker 3: at least it's very very close relatives since twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: maybe even for twenty seventeen. But we didn't know about
Speaker 3: this specific virus until it was first documented in China
Speaker 3: in the city of Wuhan and associated with a case
Speaker 3: cluster around a market, a wholesale it's called a seafood
Speaker 3: market one on seafood wholesale seafood market, but it sells
Speaker 3: lots of other different kinds of things, including live animals,
Speaker 3: wild and domesticated animals, so it's a very It's got
Speaker 3: lots of different potential bridge vectors of bridge animals that
Speaker 3: could have brought the virus from a bat reservoir to humans,
Speaker 3: but we don't know. And that case cluster was right
Speaker 3: around the end of December December three, twenty nineteen. So
Speaker 3: the disease that this is causing, it's called coronavirus disease.
Speaker 3: So the name of that is called COVID nineteen. So
Speaker 3: that's where COVID nineteen comes from.
Speaker 1: Oh got it for the year, Okay.
Speaker 3: For the year and for the disease. So it's just
Speaker 3: like HIV is human immuno deficiency virus. Oh, okay, and
Speaker 3: the disease is AIDS. So same thing. HIV virus AIDS
Speaker 3: is the disease SARS. COVID two is the virus. COVID
Speaker 3: nineteen is the disease.
Speaker 1: Oh that makes so much sense. Yeah, okay, So COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen corona viral disease from twenty nineteen, COVID nineteen. Also,
Speaker 1: after doing a chiropterology episode, I know that bats get
Speaker 1: a lot of flack, They take a lot of guano
Speaker 1: from us, And then how do they know that it
Speaker 1: wasn't from a snake that a bat aid or do
Speaker 1: they know for sure that it was the bats because
Speaker 1: the bats are so leaguered when it comes to infectious diseases.
Speaker 3: So for bats it depends. Actually bats are hit way
Speaker 3: harder by fungi and with viruses, maybe it depends. So
Speaker 3: the way right now, all we know is based on
Speaker 3: the genetic information that the virus we're collecting now shares
Speaker 3: with viruses that were collected from other bats. There was
Speaker 3: also viruses that were collected kind of accidentally from a
Speaker 3: survey of other animals, and in this case it was
Speaker 3: a pangolin, And we call it metagenomic because we were
Speaker 3: just people were characterizing the entire genetic soup without maybe
Speaker 3: looking for this in particular. Out there in nature, there
Speaker 3: have been from independently from bats and from pangolins, sequences
Speaker 3: that look similar to this virus that was collected from
Speaker 3: humans got it, But there's not been a direct link
Speaker 3: to any particular animal in the market that could have
Speaker 3: been the bridge vector, or even any particular bat in
Speaker 3: the market that could have been linked to this emergence event.
Speaker 3: So it's all being done using circumstantial evidence of the
Speaker 3: actual genetic relationship of the virus. And that's different from
Speaker 3: SARS and SARS they actually went and sampled specimens in
Speaker 3: the market and were able to draw a direct link.
Speaker 3: So we're not there yet. We're using the genetic information
Speaker 3: in the virus to say this is what it is.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what does one do on a Saturday morning
Speaker 1: Hop on the horn with your favorite bad expert. So
Speaker 1: I dialed up the bat phone where chiropterologist and bat
Speaker 1: conservationist doctor Merlin title of Merlin title dot Org was
Speaker 1: standing by.
Speaker 5: I wanted to get obviously your opinion and your expertise
Speaker 5: on coronavirus and how the bat conservation community is kind
Speaker 5: of dealing with rumors and just about bats being in
Speaker 5: the spotlight in a negative way.
Speaker 6: Well, we're deeply concerned. I've had emergency requests from Malaysia,
Speaker 6: China and Me and mar all just in the last
Speaker 6: couple of days trying to head off eradication of bats.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that your bat line, your bat phone is
Speaker 1: probably pretty overwhelmed right now.
Speaker 6: Right we're getting contact from all over the world. Well,
Speaker 6: it's a huge setback for conservation of bats worldwide. Now,
Speaker 6: whether some of these coronaviruses and other animals first evolved
Speaker 6: in bats doesn't seem to me to be overly relevant
Speaker 6: to the current situation. The current situation involves eating. You know,
Speaker 6: the first hypotheses were that it came from eating cobras
Speaker 6: or create snakes. Then it was pointed to panglins, and
Speaker 6: I even read one paper where they said, but they
Speaker 6: weren't going to go further with testing panglins, which had
Speaker 6: a ninety nine percent match. They be found anywhere from
Speaker 6: about eighty percent to ninety six percent genomic match with vats.
Speaker 6: That's really pretty meanless given that we're ninety six percent
Speaker 6: genomically identical to chimpanzees. And I don't think anybody going
Speaker 6: on a date is worried about whether their date's going
Speaker 6: to turn out to be a chimpanzee.
Speaker 5: Very true, even on tender you don't know what you're
Speaker 5: going to get, but you're probably not going to get a.
Speaker 6: You know, all life on Earth is related at some point.
Speaker 6: What we know is that we have searched bats far
Speaker 6: more intensely than other animals because they're viralist dream come true.
Speaker 6: You can set a net or trap in front of
Speaker 6: a cave with thousands of bats and have all you
Speaker 6: can handle in terms of sampling in minutes. They're quick
Speaker 6: and easy to handle. By comparison, how would you like
Speaker 6: to go out and try to get thirty cobras for
Speaker 6: your sample or thirty hyenas. I mean, you know that
Speaker 6: most of the other animals are hardly being looked at
Speaker 6: relatives to bats. Bats make absolutely superb scapegoats. They are
Speaker 6: little understood to begin with, and combine and match them
Speaker 6: with viruses which are little understood. And you know, the
Speaker 6: only viruses people know about are the ones that kill us.
Speaker 6: We have more viruses in our bodies than we have cells.
Speaker 6: People fear, they rarely tolerate, and often kill. Every animal
Speaker 6: on Earth carries viruses that could potentially be harmful. There
Speaker 6: is no animal on earth more dangerous than our fellow
Speaker 6: humans that were fingering scapegoats to seemingly avoid admission of
Speaker 6: where the real problems are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so researchers think that while it may have been
Speaker 1: hanging out in bats for a long while, it wasn't
Speaker 1: until humans came in contact with perhaps a pangolin, which
Speaker 1: is an animal that looks like kind of a cross
Speaker 1: between an ant eater and some wind chimes made of seashells.
Speaker 1: But they're critically endangered in some areas because they're the
Speaker 1: world's most trafficked mammal. They're prized for their meat and
Speaker 1: the medicinal properties of their scales. So humans tend to
Speaker 1: come in contact with these intermediate hosts like camels and
Speaker 1: pangolins and civets when we're catching and eating them. So
Speaker 1: the finger kind of points back to us as a species.
Speaker 1: And as long as we're talking about finger pointing. During
Speaker 1: a talk doctor Bennett gave at the cal Academy, she
Speaker 1: made another great point about the xenophobia that can spike
Speaker 1: during an outbreak, and she reminds us that these pandemics
Speaker 1: come from all corners of the globe, from all kinds
Speaker 1: of animals. Our common flu has killed by CDC estimations
Speaker 1: between twelve thousand and thirty thousand people in the US
Speaker 1: just since October twenty nineteen, and the two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine h one N one's wine flu, which came from
Speaker 1: pigs in North America, infected eleven to twenty one percent
Speaker 1: of the global population, killing half a million people. MERS
Speaker 1: aka Middle East Respiratory syndrome aka camel flu can be
Speaker 1: transmitted through contact with camels or by ingesting unpasteurized camel milk,
Speaker 1: and it's a highly dangerous disease to those with comorbidities. SARS,
Speaker 1: severe acute respiratory syndrome, initially came on the scene in
Speaker 1: two thousand and two, and though the mortality rate was high,
Speaker 1: there were just over eight thousand cases resulting in seven
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy four deaths, So influenzas can be much
Speaker 1: more threatening now. SARS and MERS are both coronaviruses, which
Speaker 1: around spiky things. They are almost an adorable pestilence. And
Speaker 1: I've seen pictures of it. It looks like a coushball, Yeah,
Speaker 1: an evil coushball, or like a dog toy. Right, bad intentions,
Speaker 1: just trying to live its life. I know, it's just
Speaker 1: trying to do its hustle. We just don't really like it.
Speaker 1: It's okay, I mean, congrats for being so successful so fast,
Speaker 1: but we don't like it. What exactly is it and
Speaker 1: how is it different from other coronaviruses, because is it
Speaker 1: cold a coronavirus.
Speaker 3: Technically no, Okay, well not necessarily, I should say, so
Speaker 3: we when we refer to the common cold, there's actually
Speaker 3: tons of things that can cause common cold.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there are a group of viruses called rhinoviruses that
Speaker 3: cause common cold like symptoms. There are two coronaviruses that
Speaker 3: jumped into humans from animal reservoirs that are in a
Speaker 3: different group of coronaviruses that I think up to twenty
Speaker 3: ten to twenty percent of common colds, maybe thirty are
Speaker 3: due to these human coronaviruses, but they're in a completely
Speaker 3: different cluster than these coronaviruses that include murrs and stars
Speaker 3: and stars too. Now, so those are called these. This
Speaker 3: other group is called the beta coronaviruses, and they are
Speaker 3: not typically what we think of as common cold like symptoms.
Speaker 3: Common cold is usually upper respiratory with nas of phryngeal
Speaker 3: and throat and a lot of blowing your nose and sneezing.
Speaker 3: Whereas this virus, as well as STARS one, are more
Speaker 3: associated with and mirrors in fact with pneumonia like symptoms.
Speaker 3: So they're infecting the lower respiratory tract. Got so the
Speaker 3: same with Stars two is that it seems to be
Speaker 3: associated with mostly lower respiratory and that comes with certain
Speaker 3: pathogenic implications because that's where you would get sort of
Speaker 3: pneumonia like symptoms associated with the lower respiratory tract.
Speaker 1: Okay, so most of this interview with doctor Bennett took
Speaker 1: place in an office, but afterward I thought of a
Speaker 1: few more questions. So I met up with her in
Speaker 1: the planetarium at the Call Academy that evening after her
Speaker 1: talk and before our Museum Nightlife panel to ask her
Speaker 1: just a few more things.
Speaker 3: So, this virus infects respiratory tissue, so it's mostly lung tissue,
Speaker 3: lower respiratory tissue, and then sometimes upper respiratory. So basically
Speaker 3: the symptoms are associated with a dry cough fever. Fever
Speaker 3: is the most common symptom. Eighty eight percent of all
Speaker 3: sick people develop fever, and it's not a particularly high fever,
Speaker 3: so like one hundred point four degrees and up, so
Speaker 3: people should check their temperature. Dry cough fatigue kind of
Speaker 3: like when you get the flu, you feel body ache
Speaker 3: and fatigue and then shortness of breath. And shortness of
Speaker 3: breath we used to think was the most common symptom
Speaker 3: up there with fever as the most most common symptom,
Speaker 3: but it's maybe about twenty percent of people develop shortness
Speaker 3: of breath.
Speaker 1: Okay, I heard that COVID nineteen can cause your lungs
Speaker 1: to fill up with blood or is that just a rumor?
Speaker 3: So the people that are really getting this disease very
Speaker 3: severely are getting pneumonia. So anything that infects your lower
Speaker 3: respiratory trac can eventually result in pneumonia. And that's basically
Speaker 3: an inflammatory response of your body that fills your lungs
Speaker 3: up with fluid. Fluid that your body produces to fight infection,
Speaker 3: but it kind of goes crazy. It's what we call
Speaker 3: a cytokine storm. So there are many kinds of pneumonia.
Speaker 3: It's basically inflammation of the lungs. It can be caused
Speaker 3: by bacteria, different kinds of bacteria. This is definitely consistent
Speaker 3: with viral pneumonia, which is really mostly associated with this
Speaker 3: sort of overwhelming cytokine response. So it's a big immune
Speaker 3: response that you're getting.
Speaker 1: If you're coughing a lot.
Speaker 3: And you're trying to get rid of the fluid in
Speaker 3: your lungs, probably blood might be in the sputum but
Speaker 3: in general it's pneumonia, okay.
Speaker 1: Side note, cytokines are proteins made by your immune system
Speaker 1: and they do all kinds of signaling to moderate inflammation
Speaker 1: and immunity. When those cytokines go a little hogwild, it
Speaker 1: can affect the entire body, doing really intense damage to
Speaker 1: lungs and the liver and the kidneys and so a
Speaker 1: cytokine storm can cause multiple organ failure. So just think
Speaker 1: about that when you feel too lazy to wash your
Speaker 1: hands well, or when you just can't resist touching your face.
Speaker 1: Multiple organ failure versus using some soap. Soap it is okay.
Speaker 1: But now back to the structure of the actual virus.
Speaker 3: It's a coronavirus because of these spike proteins that us
Speaker 3: prickle off of. The I mentioned that the viruses have
Speaker 3: this containing nucleic capsid the genomes inside, and then sticking
Speaker 3: off of this nuclear capsid are proteins that are really
Speaker 3: important to help the virus bind to the host cell
Speaker 3: and then fuse. So what they have to do is
Speaker 3: they bind and then they trick the host cell into
Speaker 3: basically engulfing it. It's called phagocytosis, and they engulf it
Speaker 3: into an internal bubble inside the cell called an endosome.
Speaker 3: And then once it's enclosed in the cell, it needs
Speaker 3: to punch through the host cell membrane to get into
Speaker 3: the cytoplasm of the cell and do its thing. Okay,
Speaker 3: And so it uses proteins to both bind to the
Speaker 3: cell and then once it gets engulfed, it uses those
Speaker 3: it uses proteins to tunnel to basically open up a
Speaker 3: gateway fuse and pump itself in. And so the spike
Speaker 3: protein is very important in stars coronavirus two as well
Speaker 3: as stars coronavirus one, the original for binding to the
Speaker 3: host cell. So it's these proteins determine the what we
Speaker 3: call the host tropism, kind of host it combined to,
Speaker 3: and then the kind of cells within that host they
Speaker 3: can move into. So they're very important, and they give
Speaker 3: it this sort of beautiful halo effect because these spike
Speaker 3: proteins kind of stick out like a funny crown.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's where the corona comes from.
Speaker 3: And that's where the corona comes from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and now I've seen the exponential growth curves, and
Speaker 1: have you seen that animated graph where they're all just
Speaker 1: kind of cruising along and then you see coronavirus and
Speaker 1: you just see it on this upward trajectory. That is horrifying, right,
Speaker 1: Why is it so scary and so successful so fast?
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of unanswered questions. Yeah, we know
Speaker 3: that it's spike protein does differ from Stars the First Stars.
Speaker 3: The First Stars was different in that it caused a
Speaker 3: higher rate of mortality, so the case fatality rate was
Speaker 3: around ten percent. Wow, But it didn't transmit quite as rapidly.
Speaker 3: You would get infected with the virus and then it
Speaker 3: might take four to five days to develop symptoms. We
Speaker 3: call that the incubation period, and then for days after that,
Speaker 3: another four to five days, you wouldn't be able to transmit. Oh,
Speaker 3: and then you'd only start to transmit after you'd been sick.
Speaker 3: So it made Stars the First Stars easy to contain,
Speaker 3: even though it was scary deadly. So this virus is
Speaker 3: not as deadly. Okay, it's rolling in at around the
Speaker 3: estimates vary depending on whether it's a population of older
Speaker 3: people with comorbidities or other health challenges. But it's coming
Speaker 3: in right around three percent plus or minus.
Speaker 1: But what about conflicting reports that say the danger is
Speaker 1: no big deal, less than a fraction of a percent
Speaker 1: versus others that put the death rates much higher. Who's
Speaker 1: lying to us? And what do they want out of it?
Speaker 1: Is nobody lying? Is everybody lying?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 3: What we're saying, so there are two words being used here.
Speaker 3: One is mortality and one is case fatality rate. Oh
Speaker 3: so we don't know how many people have the virus.
Speaker 3: So if you divided the number of deaths by all
Speaker 3: the unknown people that could have it, then yeah, maybe
Speaker 3: the mortality rate'd be pretty low. But what we're saying
Speaker 3: is it's about that Stars had a one in ten died.
Speaker 3: That was the case fatality rate. And so with Stars
Speaker 3: coronavirus two, COVID nineteen the case fatality rate since and
Speaker 3: we're talking about COVID nineteen the disease now that is
Speaker 3: you know, three point four percent. So that's when you
Speaker 3: know it's a case. What's the chances of it dying?
Speaker 3: So you have to be really careful what you divide
Speaker 3: it by the deaths, by the total number of known
Speaker 3: cases or the total number of potential and and that's
Speaker 3: a really really hard number to get a handle on
Speaker 3: because unlike Stars one, where you had your incubation period,
Speaker 3: and then you had your symptomatic period, and then you
Speaker 3: could transmit. With Stars two, you could start transmitting right away,
Speaker 3: even before you have any symptoms, or at least we
Speaker 3: think so, we don't know exactly when, but you're asymptomatic
Speaker 3: period can last, or incubation period can last up to
Speaker 3: two weeks on average seven six seven days, but up
Speaker 3: to two weeks, and as far as we know, people
Speaker 3: can transmit before they're symptomatic, So that means it's a
Speaker 3: lot harder to get a handle on. So when people
Speaker 3: report cases, that could be as long as fourteen days
Speaker 3: after they've been capable of transmitting to other people. So
Speaker 3: the estimate of the reproductive rate of the virus is
Speaker 3: pretty high. That it's varying from any one individual could
Speaker 3: infect two others up to four others, and in some places,
Speaker 3: in closed settings like nursing homes or cruise ships, the
Speaker 3: transmission the reproductive rate of the virus has been even higher,
Speaker 3: way higher. Yeah, so on the order of measles higher,
Speaker 3: which has a reproductive rate of twelve to eighteen.
Speaker 1: Okay, so quick recap. The reproductive rate means how many
Speaker 1: other folks an infected person could spread it to so
Speaker 1: spreading an airborne disease to twelve to eighteen others. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a reason that measles vaccines are a good idea. Now,
Speaker 1: the flu's reproduction rate is about one point three, meaning
Speaker 1: if you've got it, you'll give it to about one
Speaker 1: point three people, and SARS COVID two is estimated at
Speaker 1: about two point two, but it's still pretty early right now.
Speaker 1: As of March ninth, twenty twenty, there have been one
Speaker 1: hundred and thirteen thousand reported cases of COVID nineteen and
Speaker 1: about half of those, say two two thousand, are fully recovered.
Speaker 1: Three thousand, eight hundred and ninety five people have died.
Speaker 1: So remember that rate of reproduction for SARS CoV two
Speaker 1: can vary a lot depending on the close corners, and
Speaker 1: some folks are in living situations that put them at
Speaker 1: greater risk.
Speaker 3: So people are concerned because we don't know how many
Speaker 3: infections are out there that could be transmitting, and when
Speaker 3: we report cases, we're really only getting the tip of
Speaker 3: the iceberg. We don't know how big the base of
Speaker 3: the iceberg is, So that's why we're trying to prepare
Speaker 3: ourselves for it. You describe the epidemic curve in China.
Speaker 3: We know we can look back and trace the epidemic curve.
Speaker 3: We know that it started that the low levels of
Speaker 3: cases started in the end of December. We actually can
Speaker 3: use genetic information to predict the origins of that human form,
Speaker 3: and it's looking like mid to end of November that
Speaker 3: this ancestral virus was around the one that's causing COVID nineteen.
Speaker 3: We started to detect the cases December thirtieth. We started
Speaker 3: to see growing cases through January, big boost through Chinese
Speaker 3: New Year's and we are peaking through February and finally
Speaker 3: we're hitting the top of the curve. And now if
Speaker 3: you look at the cumulative cases, it's starting to level off,
Speaker 3: and if you're looking at the number of new cases
Speaker 3: per day, it's starting to go back down the other side.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, And this whole thing in China, at least
Speaker 3: from ramping up to hitting the peak to going down
Speaker 3: the other side has taken about two months or so
Speaker 3: two and a half months. So the big question here
Speaker 3: in the US is when we will start to hit
Speaker 3: that curve and start to really increase exponentially in terms
Speaker 3: of the number of cases that we detect, and then
Speaker 3: how high that curve will go. Will it be as
Speaker 3: intense as it was in China or will we use
Speaker 3: different methodologies to keep it flatter? And if we flatten
Speaker 3: the curve, will that make the curve last longer?
Speaker 1: So if you look at overall COVID nineteen cases, the
Speaker 1: curve starts off small and then goes skyward, and it
Speaker 1: still headed skyward. That's overall global. But if you look
Speaker 1: at just mainland China, where most of the cases have originated,
Speaker 1: it reached a peak and it's starting to cruise to
Speaker 1: the right instead of going straight up. So where can
Speaker 1: you get COVID nineteen data? I'll put links to these
Speaker 1: sources on next strain and get hub at alleywar dot com,
Speaker 1: slash ology, slash virology. But where can you get COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen itself? And now where is it? Is it on
Speaker 1: door handles? Is it on airplane trays?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: Where is it? And how do we not get it right?
Speaker 3: So this is what we call a virus that transmits
Speaker 3: by airborne droplets. There has been some evidence of vecal
Speaker 3: fecal transmission, so it has been found in those kinds
Speaker 3: of body products. Yeah, but when we say airborne droplets,
Speaker 3: that basically means that it's in the water droplets that
Speaker 3: we produce when we sneeze or cough, or if we're
Speaker 3: rubbing our eyes, nose, and mouth and then depositing or
Speaker 3: capturing a cough and depositing those on surfaces. So wherever
Speaker 3: the droplets land or are put by our hands, for example,
Speaker 3: is where the virus could be picked up by the
Speaker 3: next host. So that's different from something like measles, which
Speaker 3: is truly airborne and can actually float in the air
Speaker 3: as an aerosol, and that's why measles can potentially, if
Speaker 3: you don't get vaccinated, can be highly highly transmissible. So
Speaker 3: this is not measles. It's not fully aerosolized and airborne.
Speaker 3: It's probably most likely to infect people through being coughed
Speaker 3: on directly, have droplets land on you directly, or you
Speaker 3: pick up the virus from a surface.
Speaker 1: And then you rub your eyes or rub your nose
Speaker 1: and it gets into a mup.
Speaker 3: Or you hold your hamburger and you take a big
Speaker 3: bite and your hands have touched the burger. So it's
Speaker 3: basically any potential surface that you have touched with your
Speaker 3: hands or other body part that then you introduce to
Speaker 3: any of your own mucus membranes warm, moist. When viruses
Speaker 3: deposit things on surfaces, we call those phonemtes FO M
Speaker 3: I E S. So I'm fondly referring to my iPhone
Speaker 3: as a phoneite. So you can imagine right that potentially
Speaker 3: I'm handling the phone, I'm putting it down places other
Speaker 3: people might be picking it up, like my daughter or something.
Speaker 3: So clearly as a precaution that we can all take
Speaker 3: is to wash our hands before we use our hands
Speaker 3: to touch our mucus membranes like our eyes or nose
Speaker 3: or mouth or food that we're gonna put in our mouth, okay,
Speaker 3: and cover your cough or sneeze, because you don't want
Speaker 3: to be a spreader. And remember we could be walking
Speaker 3: around without symptoms and be spreading the virus.
Speaker 1: And our phones are disgusting, right, They're disgusting, Okay, Like
Speaker 1: keyboards and microscopes and doorknobs and elevator buttons.
Speaker 3: So avoiding touching any of those really common surfaces is
Speaker 3: just a great thing.
Speaker 1: Just a side note, I love how she said common
Speaker 1: everyday items like keyboards and doorknobs and elevator buttons and
Speaker 1: phones and microscopes. Is this amazing lady a molecular epidemiologist
Speaker 1: or what? Okay, So that is good to know that, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not that your phone might be disgusting, Like your
Speaker 1: phone is dirtier than like has more living on it
Speaker 1: than a toilet's eat or something, right, something insanely.
Speaker 3: I would not be So yeah, okay, I think that
Speaker 3: is probably very true.
Speaker 1: And how long it can can the virus that causes
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen starts to how long can it live just
Speaker 1: hanging out on your phone hanging out on a button?
Speaker 3: So I actually don't know, and I don't know if
Speaker 3: I was looking in the published literature for that information
Speaker 3: and I didn't see a study. I've heard people in
Speaker 3: the press or maybe casually mentioned different times like twenty
Speaker 3: four hours, thirty six hours with flu. With influenza, it
Speaker 3: can persist over for twenty four hours or more, but
Speaker 3: it's a totally different virus, and it depends on the temperature.
Speaker 3: So actually flu does really well. It persists longer when
Speaker 3: it's cool and dry, which is one of the reasons
Speaker 3: why influenzas does well in dry winters. In the temperate
Speaker 3: zone when we're crowded together indoors and they're living in
Speaker 3: these cool, dry environments. We don't know enough about stars
Speaker 3: Kov two to really know, but for sure, I would
Speaker 3: not doubt that it could persist a goodly amount of time.
Speaker 3: But we don't really know exactly how long that is,
Speaker 3: at least I don't.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're about to get to more common quandaries
Speaker 1: we're all facing. And you know, I usually do your
Speaker 1: Patreon questions, but I had no idea I was doing
Speaker 1: this episode until about one minute before, so I just
Speaker 1: played it by ear. Also, for each episode, we donate
Speaker 1: to a charity of the cologists choosing, and this week
Speaker 1: it went directly to the California Academy of Sciences. In
Speaker 1: the mission of the California Academy of Sciences is to explore, explain,
Speaker 1: and sustain life. They have one point five million visitors
Speaker 1: every year, forty six million scientific specimens and collections. They
Speaker 1: do scientific research, public engagement, environmental literacy programs, and sustainability education.
Speaker 1: Plus it's just a really great, fun, beautiful museum of science.
Speaker 1: California Academy of Science is awesome. So a donation goes
Speaker 1: straight to them. Thanks to these sponsors. All right, back
Speaker 1: to what I think would have been your questions. What
Speaker 1: do you think of the runs on hand sanitizer and
Speaker 1: hand sanitizer and Amazon being like two hundred dollars and
Speaker 1: you cannot buy a chlorox wipe anywhere they're all sold out.
Speaker 1: Have you stocked up? Do you have a bunker full
Speaker 1: of canned food? What's going on? No?
Speaker 3: No, no, no. I think just like anything we could
Speaker 3: potentially get, whether it's seasonal flu or coronavirus or rhinovirus,
Speaker 3: a common called virus, it's I think plenty to wash
Speaker 3: your hands and soap and water is just fine. You
Speaker 3: don't need an ethanol based hand sanitizer. An ethanol based
Speaker 3: hand sanitizer doesn't hurt either. I mean, it's not a
Speaker 3: substitute for washing your hands with soap and water. Washing
Speaker 3: your hands with soap and water is better. But hand
Speaker 3: sanitizer is fine, but it's not necessary. If you touch something,
Speaker 3: just go wash your hands as soon as you can
Speaker 3: before you touch your mucus, and you'll be fine. We
Speaker 3: don't have to like carry hand sanitizer in every pocket
Speaker 3: in every car. You can also make your own disinfectant
Speaker 3: for surfaces. Or you can just use soap and water
Speaker 3: on surfaces. So soap and water on surfaces, or any
Speaker 3: cleaner that's sixty percent ethanol or more. You can you know,
Speaker 3: buy rubbing alcohol from Oh, I hope I didn't just start.
Speaker 1: Okay, but heads up, don't use straight rubbing alcohol on
Speaker 1: your hands or you might cause a skin burn or
Speaker 1: drying or cracking. Now some folks are trying to make
Speaker 1: their own hand sanitizer. They're just going full they pinterest mode,
Speaker 1: using two thirds rubbing alcohol and a third aloveragel to moisturize.
Speaker 1: But experts are like yo, if you get the concentration
Speaker 1: wrong or you contaminate it using non sterile tools to
Speaker 1: make it, it's not going to be as effective as
Speaker 1: store bought, So don't bother. Can I douse my myths
Speaker 1: in whiskey? You ask, as long as I'm holed up
Speaker 1: drinking it hoping not to die. Well, first off, have
Speaker 1: some water, my friend. Also, whiskey is in high enough proof.
Speaker 1: Either is vodka. Tito's Vodka responsibly discouraged, hoarding and tweeted out.
Speaker 1: Per the CDC, hand sanitizer needs to contain at least
Speaker 1: sixty percent alcohol, Tito's handmade vodka is forty percent alcohol
Speaker 1: and therefore does not meet the current recommendation of the CDC.
Speaker 1: So I'm sorry to say you cannot fix things by
Speaker 1: splashing boots on your body. I know it's disappointing.
Speaker 3: And you can also make surface cleaner out of bleach.
Speaker 3: I have a lab here. I disinfect surfaces with seventy
Speaker 3: percent ethanol or ten percent bleach. But it turns out
Speaker 3: you could get away with three percent bleach. Wow, a
Speaker 3: three percent bleach solution. Just make sure you leave things wet.
Speaker 3: You don't dry them off right away.
Speaker 2: Because that bleach needs time to break down.
Speaker 3: The stilltime. Yeah, and same with ethanol wipes. So if
Speaker 3: you're buying wipes, make sure that they're still wet when
Speaker 3: you're using them. Don't use them till they dry out.
Speaker 1: Right and don't use it and then dry it off
Speaker 1: with a dirty towel. Set good point. Let's take a
Speaker 1: moment to revisit the disinfectiology episode with doctor Evan Rumberger,
Speaker 1: who is a bleach chemist at Clorox in Northern California.
Speaker 1: He has dedicated his career to killing gross stuff that
Speaker 1: can make us sick. Now, how is bleach disinfecting things.
Speaker 1: So some research that came out only about a decade
Speaker 1: ago zeroed in on the house and according to a
Speaker 1: study published in Cell magazine, the active ingredient and bleach
Speaker 1: causes proteins in bacteria and viruses to unfold in the
Speaker 1: same way that a fever would fight in infection. When
Speaker 1: you spray it first on the counter, you can leave
Speaker 1: it there to kick some bacterial and viral assets for
Speaker 1: like five to ten minutes, depending on your counter. And
Speaker 1: what about the smell of bleach. I learned on the
Speaker 1: lab trip that the more bleach you smell, the more
Speaker 1: it's kind of busting up cell walls. Is that true?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. So it's like the bleach. You know,
Speaker 4: that bleach smell is.
Speaker 3: Simmers.
Speaker 4: A lot of them love it because it's it's a
Speaker 4: good indication of coming into a clean bathroom. I can
Speaker 4: I can tell you nothing better than going into like
Speaker 4: at the ballgame and going into the bathroom and if
Speaker 4: you smell bleach in there, it's like okay, okay, we
Speaker 4: can go in here or at a restaurant. That's that's a
Speaker 4: really good side. I'm just knowing how well how well
Speaker 4: it works at disinfecting and that smell yours. It is
Speaker 4: the smell of the bleach kind of fragmenting up the
Speaker 4: things that comes in content that is a little bit
Speaker 4: of what you're smelling. That that's a nice queue, that
Speaker 4: it's done its thing.
Speaker 1: It's good to know. So the next time you think
Speaker 1: it smells like bleach in here, think well, wow, it
Speaker 1: smells like a lot of destroyed pathogens and ripped apart viruses.
Speaker 1: Aromatherapy in these trying times. And now back to virologist
Speaker 1: doctor Shannon Bennett, and what about symptoms. I know that
Speaker 1: some people can be asymptomatic. My fear because I travel
Speaker 1: a lot, Like I was on a plane this morning,
Speaker 1: I'll be on one tomorrow. My parents are have armed
Speaker 1: you compromised, and I'm afraid I'm supposed to see them
Speaker 1: in like two weeks. And I'm like, what if I
Speaker 1: pick it up and I don't know and I give
Speaker 1: it to them? Like right? We all know, or not
Speaker 1: all of us, but a lot of us know that,
Speaker 1: like those masks aren't doing anything, Like right, what do
Speaker 1: we do?
Speaker 3: So? I too have an older mother that has asthma,
Speaker 3: and I certainly wouldn't ever want to give her this.
Speaker 3: So it's like I said, it's not measles where it's
Speaker 3: going to fly through the air, but they're definitely you know,
Speaker 3: droplets can travel about six feet, so if you've developed symptoms,
Speaker 3: clearly you would want to avoid contact with them close contact.
Speaker 3: But before you develop symptoms, if you don't have symptoms,
Speaker 3: you're not coughing, so you're probably potentially depositing fo mites around.
Speaker 3: So just like we can use good hygiene to protect ourselves,
Speaker 3: you can also use good hygiene not to transmit. So
Speaker 3: if you're washing your hands frequently, not only are you
Speaker 3: not liable to give it to yourself, but if you
Speaker 3: did touch your face and hands, wash your hands again.
Speaker 3: Wash your hands before you prepare food. Don't cups, glasses,
Speaker 3: straws with your family members, like we should all not
Speaker 3: do that right now, it would be good. And don't cough.
Speaker 3: Cover your coughs or sneezes, even if they're just starting
Speaker 3: with a tickle to try to cover.
Speaker 1: Is it better to have Kleenex with you or to
Speaker 1: have like a handkerchief.
Speaker 3: I have a young daughter fourteen, and when she was
Speaker 3: growing up, it was the Batman move, like pull your
Speaker 3: pull your arm up and sneeze into your elbow or
Speaker 3: cough into your elbow. There is some interesting rumors going
Speaker 3: around about whether the virus can persist on fabric surfaces. So,
Speaker 3: for sure, we know that can persist on hard surfaces,
Speaker 3: but how does it persist on fabrics, So that I
Speaker 3: think is still up for question if it would persist
Speaker 3: longer on a handkerchief or on your sleeve. So maybe
Speaker 3: the best course is to use a disposable kleenex, throw
Speaker 3: it out, wash your hands.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, rapid fire paper towels or hand dryers.
Speaker 3: So I'm a big fan of paper.
Speaker 1: Towels, got it. What about the internet rumor that Sar's
Speaker 1: corona too is an escaped bio warfare pathogen from the
Speaker 1: Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Speaker 3: They have the same outfit that we have in terms
Speaker 3: of they have that Chinese version of the Centers for
Speaker 3: Disease Control and Prevention, that Chinese CDC, and that the
Speaker 3: rumor out there, and I don't want to repeat the
Speaker 3: rumor in case it's propagated, but you know, the rumor
Speaker 3: was that they might have been involved. Of course, many labs,
Speaker 3: especially government labs, are going to keep you know pathogens
Speaker 3: and cell cultures and different things to study things. So
Speaker 3: it's completely plausible that all of the labs around that
Speaker 3: support us and develop vaccines and drugs have some forms
Speaker 3: of these things to study. I don't put any stock
Speaker 3: into the rumor at all, and the genetic evidence supports
Speaker 3: that it's not an engineered virus.
Speaker 1: PS. If you hear the word recombination in regard to
Speaker 1: this or other viruses, don't get scared of a term
Speaker 1: you don't know. It just means that a few viruses
Speaker 1: can mix up their DNA, coinfecting the same host and
Speaker 1: exchanging genetic segments. So recombination in SARS CoV two may
Speaker 1: have been because there were multiple animal hosts, not because
Speaker 1: someone in China is trying to start the apocalypse, Rumors
Speaker 1: spread by Rush Limbaugh in Info Wars Alex Jones, the
Speaker 1: letter of whom had a self described form of psychosis
Speaker 1: and convinced people that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.
Speaker 1: Jones stated recently that SARS CoV two is the work
Speaker 1: of Chinese communists and that it's man made sentiments that
Speaker 1: manage to be not only racist, but sexist too. Now,
Speaker 1: Trevor Bedford is a Seattle based virologist at the Fred
Speaker 1: Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and has done amazing work on
Speaker 1: the genomics of SARS CoV two. And he has a
Speaker 1: thread debunking these conspiracy theories. It's on Twitter. It's definitely
Speaker 1: worth a read. I'll link it on my website at
Speaker 1: Aliward dot com slash ology, slash virology. And also, while
Speaker 1: you're at it, just follow him on Twitter at trv
Speaker 1: band And for the health of yourself and the planet,
Speaker 1: stop following potato face hate mongers. Speaking of faces, what about.
Speaker 3: Masks, So masks, masks are not all equal. There are
Speaker 3: many kinds of masks out there. There are paper masks
Speaker 3: that are not necessarily adequately filtering the air, and then
Speaker 3: there are masks with these little built in filters, and
Speaker 3: the rest of the mask is more is less much
Speaker 3: less permeable, and they're called N ninety fives. Ninety five
Speaker 3: refers to the amount of air it filters the amount
Speaker 3: of particulates it filters out of the air, So N
Speaker 3: ninety five means it filters ninety of the particles. So
Speaker 3: in a healthcare setting where you are in a crowded
Speaker 3: space and droplets are flying, they are definitely recommending, and
Speaker 3: ninety fives or higher and ninety nine's be used by
Speaker 3: healthcare professionals by people that are in closed spaces where
Speaker 3: they cannot escape a flying droplet because of this whole
Speaker 3: six foot rule and where they're concentrated and crowded with people.
Speaker 3: For most of us going about our day to day,
Speaker 3: we're probably picking the virus up, mostly from fomites. A
Speaker 3: mask is not going to protect you from fomites. And
Speaker 3: this is not measles. Where it's flying through the air.
Speaker 3: You're going to know if you're within six feet of
Speaker 3: somebody that's spraying droplets. So the mask won't help for fomites.
Speaker 3: Unless I guess some people could argue, if I'm wearing
Speaker 3: a mask, I'm not touching my face. But I bet
Speaker 3: you if you're wearing a mask, you're touching your face
Speaker 3: even more because you're adjusting the those piece. And not
Speaker 3: only that, but people need to understand that all the
Speaker 3: masks that are available, most of them are disposable. That
Speaker 3: means to use them properly. You fit them tight, and
Speaker 3: you use them once and then you throw them out,
Speaker 3: so they themselves could become fonts of fomite just by
Speaker 3: collecting the foemites that you're breathing through the air and
Speaker 3: then you're touching them. And so they're not a great idea, Yeah,
Speaker 3: unless you're in a healthcare setting right where you will
Speaker 3: be in very close quarters with direct droplets.
Speaker 1: And I've read that even people who use those in
Speaker 1: a healthcare setting have to do tests to make sure
Speaker 1: that it's fitted properly. And they're easy to use wrong.
Speaker 3: They're easy to use wrong, they're easy to use over
Speaker 3: and over again, and they could give you this false
Speaker 3: sense of security going into a situation when if it
Speaker 3: hasn't been fitted properly and there are gaps, you're actually
Speaker 3: pulling in more virus then if you didn't, and.
Speaker 2: Then there's not enough for the people who need them for.
Speaker 3: And the last thing they want is for there to
Speaker 3: be a run on masks and the people that are
Speaker 3: really exposed not having access to them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just a side note.
Speaker 1: The US Search in General tweeted an exasperated plea that
Speaker 1: started with, Seriously, people stop buying masks. They're not effective
Speaker 1: in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus. But if
Speaker 1: healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients.
Speaker 1: It puts them in our communities at risk.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 1: So what if you bought them when you thought you
Speaker 1: needed them, and now you feel bad or embarrassed about it.
Speaker 1: Don't be embarrassed. Just contact a local healthcare provider or
Speaker 1: er let them know you have clean, unused masks to donate.
Speaker 1: Medshare dot org is also taking and redistributing them. And
Speaker 1: I fly a lot. We all know this, and I
Speaker 1: was on two planes this week for work and I
Speaker 1: saw a ton of people wearing these vented and ninety
Speaker 1: five numbers. It's kind of like a Gucci purse. Once
Speaker 1: you know what it is, you see them everywhere. Also,
Speaker 1: in researching this episode, guess what all my targeted website
Speaker 1: ads are for? Yep, even the New York Times sidebar
Speaker 1: ads are for n ninety five masks enhance sanitizers. If
Speaker 1: you've been googling coronavirus a lot. So when it comes
Speaker 1: to widespread panic, there's really no escaping commerce. Now, speaking
Speaker 1: of escaping, I was supposed to give a talk It's
Speaker 1: south by Southwest ETU this week, but it was canceled.
Speaker 2: What do you think.
Speaker 1: About this particular disease being an excuse to stop going
Speaker 1: to parties.
Speaker 3: My daughter's like, when are they going to close school?
Speaker 1: What are they going to close school?
Speaker 3: So I, for one, am not changing my social gathering,
Speaker 3: but I'm being mindful of the social distancing so that
Speaker 3: the difference is that I am not necessarily shaking hands, hugging, kissing,
Speaker 3: or you know, sharing a drink with someone like I
Speaker 3: might you know, do in a party like I'll have AI.
Speaker 3: Can I taste your wine or your cocktail? So those
Speaker 3: things are definitely good things to not do at this time.
Speaker 3: But I think still at this point I think social
Speaker 3: gathering is is we don't have enough indication that the
Speaker 3: base of the iceberg is so huge that we should
Speaker 3: stop gathering socially.
Speaker 1: What about say trips, Like I know I'm going to
Speaker 1: Costa Rica. So far no cases in Costa Rica, but
Speaker 1: I'm going in a couple of months. But one patron,
Speaker 1: one listener who's a friend of mine, doctor Tiaginwall, she
Speaker 1: has had part of a lung remove because of valley fever,
Speaker 1: and she's planning on going to Hawaii with her sixty
Speaker 1: six year old dad, and she's like, should I not go?
Speaker 1: I have like a pre existing lung thing She's like,
Speaker 1: am I being paranoid?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What do you think do people keep traveling?
Speaker 3: I think the first thing she should do is talk
Speaker 3: to her medical Yeah, for sure, for sure, right, So
Speaker 3: I'm not going to say, and they've got her own lungs,
Speaker 3: but yeah, absolutely. Whenever you travel and you go transit
Speaker 3: through airports, you're passing many many more people from many
Speaker 3: many more places, and you are potentially exposing yourself to
Speaker 3: foe mites and coughs. And then again, if you're in
Speaker 3: an airplane, it's not like masles Is. There can be
Speaker 3: flying around the cabin, but if the person beside you,
Speaker 3: behind you, or in front of you is coughing actively,
Speaker 3: there's that. So again, I think being mindful that if
Speaker 3: you do travel, you need to be ultra careful about
Speaker 3: touching your eyes, nose, and mouth or food with unwashed hands,
Speaker 3: and distancing yourself and from contact with other humans it's
Speaker 3: direct contact. So I personally am still traveling. I have
Speaker 3: a wonderful trip plan to do field research in the
Speaker 3: Maldives at the end of March, March twenty seventh, I'm
Speaker 3: really really hoping that I can go. Really, what I'm
Speaker 3: saying about that is I'm looking to the CDC and
Speaker 3: following their travel advisories. So if they have issued a
Speaker 3: travel advisory against a place, and they have issued travel
Speaker 3: advisories to what they're classifying as Level three countries, yes,
Speaker 3: don't go. I'm not gonna go, and you risk if
Speaker 3: you do go, maybe not being able to get back
Speaker 3: as readily.
Speaker 6: LEUS.
Speaker 3: Many airlines are are canceling some percentage of flights. So
Speaker 3: so looking to the WHO and CDC guidelines for travel
Speaker 3: advisories based on destination is the what I am doing,
Speaker 3: and then using safe personal precautions when I do travel
Speaker 3: to non level three locations.
Speaker 1: Okay, I wonder do you think that Olympics are going
Speaker 1: to be next?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that that is what everybody's.
Speaker 1: Talking everyone's talking about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So actually I was just looking at the data
Speaker 3: in Japan and they still have not hit the top
Speaker 3: of their curve. Okay, So China has and it's heading
Speaker 3: down the other side. Japan has not quite So depending
Speaker 3: on how it all rolls, by the time the Summer
Speaker 3: Olympics occur, it could be down the other side, right
Speaker 3: and they could be starting to pull up, pull up,
Speaker 3: pull up. So we have many events here planned at
Speaker 3: the Academy. We're just keeping an eye on the data
Speaker 3: and not making any premature decisions. And you know, like
Speaker 3: I said, with diseases, they come in a wave, and
Speaker 3: the wave peaks and then it goes back down again.
Speaker 1: What causes that drop?
Speaker 3: Actually, you know, that's a very good question. Most people
Speaker 3: assume that all the people in a certain population that
Speaker 3: could have gotten it at a certain efficiency that the
Speaker 3: virus might exhibit, got it. So we're kind of thinking
Speaker 3: about it as like a herd immunity. Somehow the population
Speaker 3: of at risk, potentially exposed people is that population isn't
Speaker 3: large enough to sustain ongoing virus transmission for whatever reason.
Speaker 3: And there's lots of things that might determine that. In China,
Speaker 3: it was concentrated in Wuhan, Probably many people that could
Speaker 3: have been exposed were exposed. And the virus is now
Speaker 3: running out of running rim Like many kids are not
Speaker 3: showing symptoms, maybe they're not on the re So people
Speaker 3: that are going to get it that would have showed
Speaker 3: that they got it is starting to run down. So
Speaker 3: what we don't know is what the United States is
Speaker 3: going to look like. We don't know if we're going
Speaker 3: to have a bell shaped epidemic curve in a given
Speaker 3: place or whether it'll be across the whole country. So
Speaker 3: for example, for sure in Seattle, there's definitely a curve
Speaker 3: going up and coming back down. But it could be
Speaker 3: that we at a country level stay with these sort
Speaker 3: of very discrete events like that, and we never as
Speaker 3: a country go through a curve where the virus never
Speaker 3: nationally runs out of susceptibles, essentially, and.
Speaker 1: Quick aside in case you're like, what's going on in Seattle, Well,
Speaker 1: the first US case of COVID nineteen appeared outside of Seattle,
Speaker 1: when a thirty five year old man who had recently
Speaker 1: traveled to huan China came back with it, and as
Speaker 1: of this recording, nearly one hundred folks have been diagnosed
Speaker 1: and eighteen have died in the Seattle area. Somehow spread
Speaker 1: to a nursing care facility in Kirkland, Washington, causing the
Speaker 1: deaths of thirteen residents and spreading to a suspected half
Speaker 1: of its one hundred and eighty workers. Although the center
Speaker 1: is having trouble getting a hold of enough testing kits,
Speaker 1: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up and
Speaker 1: donated one hundred million dollars to global public health authorities
Speaker 1: to try and fight COVID nineteen, starting with trying to
Speaker 1: make testing kits available to Seattle area residents. So why
Speaker 1: you might ask, if you are my parents who just
Speaker 1: asked me as I was researching, are older folks more
Speaker 1: risk for this? And why haven't we seen COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: in kits? So A few theories are that as we age,
Speaker 1: our immune systems just are not as strong and our
Speaker 1: inflammatory response may be greater, causing that cytokine storm that
Speaker 1: can cause organ problems. So obviously no one wants to
Speaker 1: get this and no one wants to give this to anyone.
Speaker 1: So what do you do if you feel like garbage?
Speaker 1: Are there even enough testing kits available right now?
Speaker 6: Em?
Speaker 1: Not really Now. The CDC recommends in any case to
Speaker 1: call a healthcare provider immediately and they will assess your symptoms.
Speaker 1: Also have a working thermometer available, because a low grade
Speaker 1: fever is one of those symptoms. Now, for mild symptoms,
Speaker 1: CDC says stay at home and isolate, don't spread it
Speaker 1: to your family, and for worsening symptoms, alert your doctors
Speaker 1: so that if you do come in they're prepared with
Speaker 1: the right testing kits and their own precautionary measures. Don't
Speaker 1: just saunter in to urgent care unannounced like a mother
Speaker 1: in law doing a drop by on a Sunday. Give
Speaker 1: them a heads up first. Also, a healthy immune system
Speaker 1: is important, so take your vitamin see, stay hydrated with
Speaker 1: not vodka, get a lot of sleep. You have waited
Speaker 1: years to have a good excuse to stay in and
Speaker 1: watch Netflix and nap. You're welcome. Also, if you need
Speaker 1: a show to watch, can I suggest One hundred Humans,
Speaker 1: which premieres on March thirteenth. If you're bored, tweet to
Speaker 1: Netflix and tell them you love it. Also, take care
Speaker 1: of your immune system. Do you think our immune systems
Speaker 1: will eventually get hip to it or do you think
Speaker 1: that eventually they'll have a vaccine in a couple of
Speaker 1: months or is it just like wash your hands. The
Speaker 1: vaccines are not going to come fast enough.
Speaker 3: Well, two things. One is that it does take time
Speaker 3: to develop a vaccine. There are vaccine candidates that are
Speaker 3: being researched right now and they look promising, but to
Speaker 3: get that through drug testing and everything could take months
Speaker 3: to a year. So stay tuned. But The other question too,
Speaker 3: is how effective a vaccine will be. And with influenza,
Speaker 3: we know that that immunity does wane, it doesn't match anymore,
Speaker 3: and it's not as effective, whereas with some things like measles,
Speaker 3: the vaccine's awesome and it lasts decades. Right, So it
Speaker 3: really depends, and all viruses are different, and the kind
Speaker 3: of antibodies they lisit in the human body that could
Speaker 3: then be leveraged to boost people give people a vaccine
Speaker 3: as still completely unknown with this virus. I mean there's candidates,
Speaker 3: but there's not there's not enough information.
Speaker 1: So a lot of companies are urging workers to telecommute,
Speaker 1: which I think is a great idea. Personally, I will
Speaker 1: be doing that as much as possible, and perhaps so
Speaker 1: should you if your job situation lends itself to that,
Speaker 1: which is a privilege in and of itself. But so
Speaker 1: so many people simply cannot afford to take off work
Speaker 1: and can't telecommute because their job involves being on site
Speaker 1: to teach or to build something, or to serve something
Speaker 1: or fix something. And for them, it's good to be
Speaker 1: mindful to try to cut this thing off because some
Speaker 1: people can't take certain steps to lower their risk. Oh
Speaker 1: and if you're wondering if your dog can spread it
Speaker 1: to you or others, the World Health Organization says, nah,
Speaker 1: but you should wash your hands after penning animals.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: They said nothing about telling your animals how beautiful they
Speaker 1: are from across the room, which I've been doing. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know what, let's try to like in this uplot
Speaker 1: the movie Contagion, yes or no? Any virus movies that
Speaker 1: you actually like.
Speaker 3: I actually kind of like Outbreak. It's a lot cornier,
Speaker 3: but I love Dustin Hoffmann. Okay, that's I was like,
Speaker 3: I think those are all really super Fund remain called.
Speaker 1: Many people are dying and are going to continue to
Speaker 1: die unless we find this monkey. So Jarrett was being
Speaker 1: an angel and helping me as I was scrambling to
Speaker 1: put this episode together, and this Outbreak clip made him
Speaker 1: rip off his headphones and tell me I needed to
Speaker 1: contact my favorite disastrologist, doctor Samantha Montano from the Disastrology
Speaker 1: episode immediately. Now it was ten pm her time on
Speaker 1: a Sunday. I gently texted her and she was up
Speaker 1: and down to chat on the phone, because, as her
Speaker 1: Twitter bio states, she's not just a disastrologist. She's a
Speaker 1: cool disastrologist, so I asked her, what the hell should
Speaker 1: we do? Should we panic? Okay, doctor Montana, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for talking to me. You're welcome in this
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen fear and scare and threat. What do you
Speaker 1: suggest that people know or do?
Speaker 6: Sure?
Speaker 8: So, the first thing that I recommend is that folks
Speaker 8: listen to the information being put out by their local
Speaker 8: public health and emergency management officials. They'll be the agencies
Speaker 8: that have the most up to date information for your
Speaker 8: specific area, and so following their advice is your best bet.
Speaker 1: Where do people find their local emergency management officials?
Speaker 7: Good question.
Speaker 8: So the best thing to do is to just go
Speaker 8: to Google and search the name of your city, town,
Speaker 8: or county with emergency management and or public health, and
Speaker 8: you should have an agency come up. They're all named
Speaker 8: slightly different, so you kind of have to just search
Speaker 8: around for it. But once you find their websites, you
Speaker 8: should be able to find a place to sign up
Speaker 8: for email or text alerts, or at least their social
Speaker 8: media so you can follow them on there.
Speaker 1: I did this for a Los Angeles side note, and
Speaker 1: it pulled up the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health,
Speaker 1: the California Department of Public Health, the CDC, the World
Speaker 1: Health Organization sweet So think locally first, see what's happening nearby, Okay,
Speaker 1: and should we be taking this as the apocalypse is coming?
Speaker 1: Or is this just a new disease and so people
Speaker 1: are just being very precautious.
Speaker 8: Well I would definitely not say it is the apocalypse, fortunately,
Speaker 8: but you know, this is something that needs to be
Speaker 8: taken very seriously. So remember that kind of for the
Speaker 8: majority of people you know that are taking precautions, they're
Speaker 8: doing so not for yourself.
Speaker 7: But rather for the people around you who are at
Speaker 7: a higher risk, people who have, you.
Speaker 8: Know, certain chronic illnesses or our elderly and have those
Speaker 8: higher risks.
Speaker 7: We want to make sure that we're not doing anything
Speaker 7: to spread this around to them.
Speaker 1: So you're not a diva or high maintenance. If you're
Speaker 1: being extra precautious, you're just being kind of kind and
Speaker 1: compassionate and empathetic to others. Yes, absolutely, are guys going
Speaker 1: to start washing their hands? Do you think I would
Speaker 1: really hope. So that's been one thing that has been
Speaker 1: quite illuminating. How many guys on Twitter are like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of guys just cruised right out of the
Speaker 1: bathroom without washing their hands. How about that?
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's disgusting.
Speaker 1: And then what about kind of a little bit of
Speaker 1: the panic or the fear? What should what should people
Speaker 1: do emotionally?
Speaker 8: Yeah, so I think the most important thing is to
Speaker 8: just remember to be kind to each other. There's a
Speaker 8: lot of really confusing and conflicting information flying around, and
Speaker 8: this is very genuinely scary for a lot of people.
Speaker 8: And so, you know, I think we want to be
Speaker 8: careful when we see people taking certain actions that to
Speaker 8: us may seem slightly or irrational, or may seem like
Speaker 8: they're making a decision out of panic. It's important to
Speaker 8: remember that we don't necessarily know their individual situation. We
Speaker 8: don't understand, you know, who they're living with at home,
Speaker 8: who may be high risk, what particular needs their family
Speaker 8: may have, And so we want to be kind of
Speaker 8: careful about how we're interpreting some behaviors that kind of
Speaker 8: from the outside or with more information or more accurate information,
Speaker 8: may seem irrational, are actually relatively rational reactions for them.
Speaker 1: That's such a good point, because you don't know if
Speaker 1: someone's imm compromised, or if they're caring for something who is,
Speaker 1: and so don't judge people for being cautious.
Speaker 7: Exactly.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about people who are are stockpiling
Speaker 1: canned food and water and pure ol? Do you think
Speaker 1: there's a need to get ready for maybe mandatory quarantines
Speaker 1: or what should we do?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 8: So, I think the general consensus coming out of official
Speaker 8: agencies is that there is a recommendation that folks have
Speaker 8: a supply of food at their homes. The kind of
Speaker 8: general consensus seems to be two weeks worth. That again,
Speaker 8: is gonna kind of look different for different people's situations.
Speaker 7: I think really the ideal with that is if you
Speaker 7: are in a position.
Speaker 8: Where you need to stay home for multiple weeks and
Speaker 8: it's not safe for you to leave your house, that
Speaker 8: you are able to feed yourself.
Speaker 7: That said, you know, emergency managers.
Speaker 8: On a daily basis recommend that you have multiple days
Speaker 8: worth of food and water in your house for any
Speaker 8: disaster that may occur.
Speaker 7: So that's pretty standard advice.
Speaker 1: If you didn't already have that, that might be why
Speaker 1: you're heading out to get it now, right Exactly? What
Speaker 1: about big events being canceled or postponed. I know that
Speaker 1: in some countries' weddings are being postponed or banned. Gatherings
Speaker 1: of over a thousand people. I know south By Southwest
Speaker 1: just canceled. Good call. Do you think.
Speaker 7: It really depends on where you are.
Speaker 8: It's a situation where we don't necessarily have all of
Speaker 8: the data that we would ideally want to be able
Speaker 8: to make the most informed decisions. This happens a lot
Speaker 8: during disasters, and so officials are needing to make decisions
Speaker 8: kind of based on the best information that they have.
Speaker 8: Presumably they're making those decisions based on information that they've
Speaker 8: been given by local public health officials, and so that's,
Speaker 8: you know, a good approach.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so smart and helpful. I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but I've had some stuff get canceled that I've been like, yes.
Speaker 7: Seconds stamp, that's funny.
Speaker 8: I'm actually going to a conference tomorrow in Hawaii and
Speaker 8: it has not been cancellable, and it's been very shocking.
Speaker 7: I thought for sure it would be.
Speaker 1: I hope you have some hand wipes, Yes, I do. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I hope you fly safe. Send updates from paradise.
Speaker 7: I will do all right.
Speaker 1: Doctor Montano, thank you so much. Wash your hands you too, Okay,
Speaker 1: Doctor Shannon Bennett had to jet, so we wrapped it up,
Speaker 1: and I know you got to go to a next meeting.
Speaker 1: I'll ask you the last two questions. I always ask
Speaker 1: worst thing about your job, crappiest thing about it. I
Speaker 1: know that you. I'm asking this of someone who has
Speaker 1: had malaria and dysentery in a leper colony during a war.
Speaker 1: But what's the worst thing about your job? It could
Speaker 1: be anything.
Speaker 3: So so I'm actually a dual role right now I'm doing.
Speaker 3: I'm the chief of science at the Academy as well
Speaker 3: as an ologist, virologists and malec demiologists, And so I
Speaker 3: would say that the administrative parts of my job like that.
Speaker 3: And even as an ologist, you have these administrative duties
Speaker 3: like writing reports and writing grants that can that is
Speaker 3: I do find tedious. But doing the actual research, the
Speaker 3: field work, so the administrative part of it is a
Speaker 3: little painful. That's what I like the least.
Speaker 2: So amazing that you could have.
Speaker 1: It's part of your job, but the paperwork is worse.
Speaker 1: I get it, I get it.
Speaker 3: I mean you could get dysentery from anything.
Speaker 1: Really Oh my god, what's your favorite thing about what
Speaker 1: you do?
Speaker 3: So that exactly the adventure of going out into the field.
Speaker 1: I love that part.
Speaker 3: I just love seeing new places and seeing new people,
Speaker 3: and I the feeling of discovery that I might catch
Speaker 3: a mosquito that contains a droplet of blood that it
Speaker 3: took from some obscure animal and nature that might have
Speaker 3: the secret to a new virus that I could discover
Speaker 3: is so exciting. And we've discovered new viruses and it's
Speaker 3: really incredible. And then bringing that secret information back into
Speaker 3: the lab and cracking open the genome and solving it
Speaker 3: and doing the analysis and looking at the family tree
Speaker 3: of these viruses and how they relate to each other
Speaker 3: is my absolute favorite thing ever.
Speaker 1: Thank you so so much for doing this. So in essence,
Speaker 1: just wash your hands. Calm down a little bit, right.
Speaker 3: Wash your hands. Social distance, stay home if you're sick.
Speaker 3: Like a lot of people, we're in this culture where
Speaker 3: we think I will just tough it out.
Speaker 7: Oh I won't affect anybody.
Speaker 3: I'll just go to work anyway. But this is not
Speaker 3: the time to be tough. Right to stay home if
Speaker 3: you're sick.
Speaker 1: Got it, We'll do Thank you.
Speaker 2: Doctor, thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 1: So, folks, this is potentially very serious. Not gonna let you,
Speaker 1: but it can be potentially contained faster. Not with panic.
Speaker 1: Panic never saved anyone, but preparedness, conscientiousness, compassion, empathy, and
Speaker 1: handwashing have saved lives. And as someone who has loved
Speaker 1: ones who are immunocompromised, I'm hoping people stay home when
Speaker 1: they can. We all just do our best to hunker
Speaker 1: down and let this thing pass over us with a
Speaker 1: curve that doesn't look like a six flags attraction, I
Speaker 1: myself will be laying low more than I usually do.
Speaker 1: And what did we learn? Ask smart people stupid questions
Speaker 1: and don't touch them or your face. Don't touch their
Speaker 1: face either.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Doctor Shannon Bennett is on Twitter and Instagram at Microbe
Speaker 1: Explorer and we are at ologies on both. I'm at
Speaker 1: Ali Ward with one l on both again. Also, One
Speaker 1: hundred Humans premieres on Netflix March thirteenth. We've been working
Speaker 1: on the show for a couple of years and Sammy
Speaker 1: obeyed in zeb Johnson. My co hosts and comedians are
Speaker 1: great and wonderful and you will love them and I
Speaker 1: hope it gets you through some self imposed isolation for safety.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Links to all the good stuff we talked about will
Speaker 1: be at aliword dot com, slash ologies slash virology, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to put that link in the show notes.
Speaker 1: And ologi'es merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank
Speaker 1: you Shannon Felts and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. They
Speaker 1: also have a comedy podcast called You Are That, which
Speaker 1: is great Aaron Telbert admin's Theologies podcast Facebook group. Thank
Speaker 1: you Emily White and all the volunteer Ologies transcribers for
Speaker 1: keeping these episodes accessible. Transcripts are available. I'll put a
Speaker 1: link in the show notes where you can get transcripts
Speaker 1: and bleeped episodes for kids in the show notes for free.
Speaker 1: If you ever need to hire a transcriptionist, email hire
Speaker 1: Emily White at gmail dot com. She is incredible. Thank
Speaker 1: you to you assistant editor Jared Sleeper of Mindjmmedia and
Speaker 1: the podcast My Good Bad Brain for helping put all
Speaker 1: these clips together. And of course huge thanks to editor
Speaker 1: Steven Ray Morris of the dino podcast c Jurassic Rights
Speaker 1: and the kitty themed Procast for stitching it all together
Speaker 1: like one big, sloppy genome. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed
Speaker 1: the theme music. And if you stick around to the
Speaker 1: end of the show, you know I tell you a secret.
Speaker 1: This week's secret is that I have seen a lady
Speaker 1: walk out of the bathroom maybe twice in my life
Speaker 1: without washing her hands. I've witness this, honestly, maybe twice,
Speaker 1: and both times it was like seeing a ghost. I
Speaker 1: couldn't believe my eyes. I was like, she's cruised right
Speaker 1: out of here, not even any water on her paws.
Speaker 1: And I went back to my table at the restaurant.
Speaker 1: I told everyone so, this entire COVID nineteen situation has
Speaker 1: truly alerted me to how much weird sad machismo prevents
Speaker 1: boys from washing their hands. So, boys, we love you,
Speaker 1: don't let it kill you. We just respectfully ask you
Speaker 1: to please wash your myths. As our friends the Doctor's
Speaker 1: Aaron's Welch and Almond Nupdyke from this podcast will kill
Speaker 1: you say, wash your hands. You're filthy animals. Also, I
Speaker 1: want you to know that if you eat a lot
Speaker 1: of goat yogurt, sometimes your pit smell like goats the
Speaker 1: next day. It's so weird. Has that ever happened to you?
Speaker 1: But goat Yogurt's so good. Okay, bye bye pack Aderman's
Speaker 1: College Theology or doo Zoology, Lithology in Technology, meteorology, pertology, nythology, seriology, stelenology.
Speaker 4: Oh we gonna come choking, not gonna hate up a
Speaker 4: thousands atholtics.
Speaker 1: And that's asie.
Speaker 7: Why why why why
Speaker 1: Bye Corona