Factually! with Adam Conover - The Truth about COVID-19 and the Next 18 Months

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

In this special episode, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, Dr. Ashish Jha, joins Adam to explain the reality and dispel myths about the coronavirus pandemic, what must be done to combat the illness, and how long the road ahead truly is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to this special emergency coronavirus edition of Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And look, we all have a lot of questions right now. Am I going to get sick? Do I really need to stay inside and not see my friends? How long is this going to last? Will Idris Elba be okay? We have a lot of these questions. And one of the big problems I've noticed during this pandemic is how hard it's been to get reliable answers to these questions that get everyone on the same page. You know, last Saturday, I found myself quarantined in my home reading tweets and news articles about how important it was for all of us to stay inside.

While the bar down the street from me was full of partiers, people drinking, swap and spit the usual. I called my parents up and I said, hey, I'm staying inside. And they were like, wait, are you supposed to do that? No one said that yet where we live, to us. And that made me appreciate the degree to which not everyone is getting the same message right now. And even for people like me, someone who's trying to learn as much as I can, it doesn't always feel possible to get clear answers to the questions I have. There's so much uncertainty lying in front of us and so few clear answers. Well, when I'm in a situation like this, a situation where I need to know the answer to a question and I cannot find it myself,

my approach is to find an expert who really does know, someone who has spent a lifetime studying the issue and who's immersed in the topic up to their elbows and ask them. And I'm very happy to say that after an emergency, exhaustive, high and low search, we have found exactly that expert and they are on the show today. His name is Dr. Ashish Jha. He's an MD, a professor of global health at Harvard, and he is the director of Harvard's Global Health Institute. I cannot imagine a more authoritative voice to bring to you today. And he was gracious enough to take the time

during what you can imagine is a very busy time for professors of global health. He was very gracious enough to take the time to answer all of my questions clearly, concisely, and compassionately. If you need a primer on exactly what this virus is, how we can protect ourselves from it, and what the future of life in America looks like from here on out, he has about the best answers you're going to be able to get anywhere. So I hope you enjoy this interview, but more importantly, I hope that you

take it in, that you take these answers to heart, and that you continue doing everything that you can to help us stop the spread of this disease. Without further ado, here's Dr. Ashish Jha. Dr. Jha, thank you so much for being here with us at a very chaotic time. Yeah, my pleasure to be here. I hope I can be helpful, but it is chaotic. It is. We're recording this on Thursday at 11 a.m. Pacific time, just for when folks are listening to this later in case events overtake us. But how does the situation with COVID-19 look to you right now from your perspective as a public health expert? So there's some good news and bad news, news. I'm starting to feel a little more optimistic

than I was a few days ago. If we take a big step back and say, where are we as a country? I'm just going to talk about America because what's happening in Europe is very different. What's happening in China is very different. We are right now in America on the steep part of the curve in terms of infections. We've got more than 10,000 people now identified as having an infection. That number is going to continue to rise pretty exponentially over the, I suspect, next week, 10 days. And so it's going to look like it's getting much, much worse. The big holdup has been that we can't get anybody tested. Nobody knows who's got COVID because we just didn't get the test right. That's starting to get better, where our testing is starting to kick in. So I feel like we're in for a pretty tough couple of weeks,

but I can start seeing some light at the end of this tunnel. But, okay, so everyone's been saying we want to flatten the curve, right? That we want to slow the rate of infection so that we don't overwhelm, we don't have like a glut in our healthcare system. Exactly. Do you feel that we are doing that or are we failing at doing that or are we somewhere in between? So we're probably a little bit in between. Here's what the issue is. We started late. Like if we had started flattening the curve two weeks ago, I think we would have been in much, much better shape. But I think two weeks ago, we were still a little bit in denial about the whole thing.

And we're not flattening it quite as much as we want. You know, look, a lot of people are working from home. Kids are out of school. People are like, what do you mean? We're not flattening the curve as much as we need to. Well, there's still in some states, people are out there still hitting up bars and restaurants and still seeing party goers in Florida at the beaches. That is not helpful right now. And it may seem innocent enough, but what that means is that 10 days, two weeks from now,

we're going to see hospital beds filled up. And look, if you get sick with COVID or without, like you could get in a car accident and need a hospital bed. There may not be one available for you. So it's not just something that's going to affect only the elderly. And tell me about just, I think this case is being made a lot in the media, but I want to hear from you for the person who is healthy. Say, you know, I'm 36, I'm in good health. I went for a jog yesterday. Why shouldn't I go out to the bar tonight, even though, hey,

I feel fine. And I bet for me, it would just be a cold. Well, it most likely wouldn't just be a cold. It'd be the flu and it'd make you feel pretty terrible. But you're right. The average 36 year old healthy person is going to do OK. There are two problems with this. One is there are people in their 20s and 30s and 40s who are dying from this infection. It is not completely without risk. We've seen it. We saw the doctor in China who was the guy who kind of called it out early. He was in his 30s and he ended up dying from the disease. So we're seeing that. And so I would not take it quite so lightly. The second, of course, is that it turns out that 36-year-old healthy people have friends and family who sometimes are older or sicker than that. So

you may have a friend who's immunocompromised. You don't even know it, but you could then spread the infection to your friend who dies from it. You could spread it to your parents. You could spread it to your grandparents. I mean, I guess if you basically say, I don't really care about anybody else. I don't care about my friends and family. And if they all die, we're good because I probably won't die. That's okay. But that's not how most people feel. And I don't think that's where most people want to go. And it seems to me that there's this general way that this disease spreads by people coming into contact, spreading it and coming into contact with another person. And so even if you're not thinking about yourself personally, or, hey,

none of my friends and family are immunocompromised or elderly, I'm not going to see those people anyway. Just by you moving around and contacting people, you're creating an amount of transmission vectors. And by reducing those generally, that's like a good for everyone. We should all be trying to reduce that as much as possible. Exactly. So you could spread it to your friend who could then see your immunocompromised friend. Look, this stuff is out. It gets out in the community. Once it gets out in the community, it becomes very hard to curtail. And so it's super important that everybody do their part. It's not just going to be good for you. It's going to be good for everybody else in your in your neighborhood, in your community, in your family.

So I want to ask about some of the big questions that people have about this. And I I'd like you to answer to the best of your knowledge. Right. this, and I'd like you to answer to the best of your knowledge, right? One of the big ones is, first of all, how long do you think that we will be on high alert in this way? Do you have any guess as to that? You said that, you know, we're going to be going up the peak for a couple weeks, but in terms of how long will we be in that state of, hey, we're all trying to keep infection down, so we're all gonna stay in our houses as much as possible? Yeah, yeah. Look, I think it's hard to answer, and I'll tell you why it's hard to answer.

The biggest reason is I don't even know how many infections there are in America because we're still not doing testing, not extensively. We're doing some, better than we were last week. So what I have called for is that everybody's gotta essentially shelter in place, hang out at home, not do a lot of socializing until we get broad testing across America. And if my hope is that in the next week, 10 days, we can get there.

Once we have broad testing, we'll know in which neighborhoods and communities do we have a lot of virus, in which case we may need to continue kind of holding down the fort a bit. And there are going to be other communities where it's not so bad, and we've identified most people who are infected, and then we can probably relax the constraints a bit. Got it. We don't know right now because we don't have any data. And until we start getting information about who's sick and who's not and how many people

are sick, it's very hard to know what to do next. So just to take an example, let's talk about where I live, Los Angeles. I'm in the entertainment industry. Entertainment industry shut down. People are asking, when can we start filming TV shows again? Right. Because that's very important to everybody in terms of making money. We've got everyone from the people writing the shows to the to the grips and the PAs, you know, need to work. And so it really sounds like it comes down to getting thorough tests in Los Angeles. And then it's going to be like local to this area. Once,

once LA County says people can go back to work. That's what we're going to be looking for. Yeah. And what LA County says is probably going to be different than what Manhattan is saying, which is probably gonna be different than what's happening in Seattle or Dallas or Boston, right? It's going to be community to community. And every community is going to have to make a choice. Look, if I didn't care about the economy, I didn't care about anybody's livelihood, I would just say, we should

all stay locked down for 12 to 18 months. But that's crazy. It's going to destroy the economy. It's going to ruin the fabric of our society. We can't do that. So we're going to have to make some calculated risk-benefit decisions, I think, in a couple of weeks when we have evidence. So if you're going to make a decision on trade-offs, you've got to know what the data are. You've got to know how big a risk you're taking. Right now, I have no idea how big a risk we're taking. That's what we've got to figure out. no idea how big a risk we're taking. That's what we got to figure out. So let me ask you another one. There's been speculation that, hey, maybe this disease will die down in the summer, in the warmer months, but then maybe come back. What is your view on that? Yeah, so people have brought that up. And the example of that is a 1918 flu that killed 50

million people around the world. Exactly. A lot of people died in the spring. Summer was quiet. In the fall, huge resurgence, massive numbers of deaths. That's entirely, I think it's possible. I'm not counting on a big like summer months will make this infection go away. But I am counting on all the stuff we're doing now slowing the infection rate down so much that we might have an easier time over the summer. Then I start worrying, well, what does that mean for the fall? Does that mean that things get better in the summer and then are we essentially shut down all fall and winter? That's not a great option either. So it is possible that we can slow things down into the summer. I think we

should try, but it's not going to get us out of the woods. We're not going to be completely out of the woods with this infection until we get a vaccine or some very effective therapies. That's what I was going to ask because it seems like, hey, we're all staying inside right now. I don't believe I've caught it, but let's, let's say I haven't, but Hey, once I start going outside again, then I'm exposed again, I become a transmitter again. And you know, we can't stay in that position forever. So we really are just waiting for a vaccine. We are, but the vaccine is a good 12 to 18 months away. Um, under the best of circumstances is 12, more likely closer to 18. Why is that? It just takes a while, right? So it takes a long time to build a vaccine. We've never

built a vaccine for a coronavirus before. It is amazing to me what the scientific community has done. Look, you got to remember two and a half months ago, none of us had ever heard of this virus. And, you know, we've in two months ago, we identified it. And in the last two months, we've sequenced it. We've built up, we've actually two months ago, we identified it. And in the last two months, we've sequenced it. We've built up, we've actually got prototypes of vaccines. They're going into human trials. It just takes a long time. Even if the vaccines that we're building now work, then you got to ramp it up.

You got to make like hundreds of millions of doses of that thing. Yeah. So there is a lot of work ahead and you got to make sure it's pure and it's effective and all that stuff. So 12 months is what I think is like the super optimistic scenario. 18 months is maybe the more realistic scenario. So we've got to come up with a plan of how we're going to get through the next 18 months. Can't be hunkered down in a home for 18 months. That's going to drive everybody crazy and destroy our economy. We also can't just go about our business because a lot of people are

going to die. We've got to come up with a right medium solution around this. Who comes up with that solution? Usually, again, we haven't dealt with things like this, but the way it ought to work is you get public health experts and scientists and virologists and doctors, and they give their scientific advice. And then political leaders take that advice into account and have frank conversations with the American people about what are you willing to tolerate? Are we willing to tolerate a few extra deaths for a little more economic activity? Those are the trade-offs, and they're painful trade-offs, right? There are are no easy tradeoffs here. But the problem is that it's been really hard to get this administration to deal with this seriously. I think in the last five, six days it started.

the American people about the challenging times ahead. Look, I actually think that we as a country are going to get through this. We're going to get through it without too much hurt, but it is going to be hard. And people need to have very honest conversations and like kind of rose-colored glasses of it's going to be great and we've got it under control. It's not helpful because if we don't have it under control, we shouldn't tell people we have it under control. Yeah, I've been, you know, I had people saying to me, you know, fans of fans of my work saying, Hey, Adam, I think you should try to calm people down. I think people are panicking. And my response was, I think it's all, I don't think panic is good, but I think that fear in this case is maybe okay to some extent, because this is a very serious situation. It is serious. And my take is, I don't even know if I want people to be scared.

I just want people to understand the reality of this. It's a serious situation. And it's not beyond our capacity to deal with it. We're not all going to die. It'll be okay, but we're going to have people get sick and some of them will die. And our strategy should be two things, making sure that as few people die as possible and making sure that our economy is not completely destroyed. Those are our two goals. I think we can achieve them. There's a little bit of a balancing act, but we're not going to like, if we tell people, hey, it's all going to be fine. You're not going to make any sacrifices. No, people will have to make sacrifices. It'll be hard. Well, one thing I'm curious about is that I've heard people say that, hey, every expert on this type of disease on, you know, pandemics of this nature would tell

you, yeah, we knew that something like this was likely to happen eventually, that pandemics are a real threat that have to be constantly managed. And so, I mean, is this particular scenario, hey, a disease comes through that no one has immunity to and everyone has to go on lockdown. Is this literally something that you saw coming with this exact scenario? It's amazing. You know, even the Obama administration did these little trials, like these mock things of like what happens if a pandemic hits. They would try to do it with

the Trump administration kind of during transition. In every one of these mocks, it's a virus that originates in China that no one has immunity to. And then it jumps to, it comes from like an animal, it gets into Europe and America, like this exact scenario. Now, most people thought it would be an influenza virus and not a coronavirus. But that's like, you know, that's kind of an interesting scientific fact that for people doesn't matter. This is exactly the scenario everybody played out. And so if that's the case, why is it taking so many of us by surprise? Why is it seeming even to take our medical establishment by surprise or our administration by surprise? Well, so they're two separate things. I mean, look, I don't expect most Americans to be

walking around knowing what the likely next pandemic is. Sure. Right. Like people have got busy lives and they're trying to just get through their day. And but they do expect people like me to know what the next pandemic is likely to be. And we did. And I like nothing about this as a surprise. To me, the big surprise is in mid-January, when it was very clear that we were going to have a global pandemic, In mid-January, when it was very clear that we were going to have a global pandemic, how the administration decided that if we close our eyes and act like nothing's happening, it'll automatically go away. Pandemics don't disappear because you're just going to act like it's not there. You know, it's just sort of not how these things work.

And so we had a two-month period where liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, a lot of us were just saying, we got to do something about it. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And the administration just ignored it. You heard it from the administration. We got it under control. It's no worse than the flu. It's no big deal. And all of us kept saying,

like, why are you saying that? We know that's not true. Yeah. And at some point, once the Dow had fallen like 10,000 points and the economy was like grinding to a halt, it no longer became possible to say this is all a hoax. And then, like, you had to face it. And that's where the administration is. They just have to face it because reality has caught up with it. So tell me what this looks like. First of all, are there cases in which similar pandemics, you know, have been squelched earlier? Like I know I've heard about Ebola as being an example where a lot more was done. Is that comparable as, you know, we should have done those things? And what would, in this case, an immediate proper response have looked like that? And, you know,

what different world could we be living in? Yeah. So we could have had like the Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan response. Each of those countries took a totally different approach. What they did was they ramped up testing. They started testing people right away. Everybody who was infected got quarantined. All their contacts got identified and monitored. And then when those people showed symptoms, they got tested, they got quarantined if they had it. And they went through this very aggressive testing period. And guess what? South Korea had a little spike. And now South Korea is close to like, they're close to getting around their epidemic. We've seen the same thing in Singapore, same thing in Taiwan.

Japan has also basically done the same thing. So it's clearly possible. The problem is in Europe, in Italy, and here in the United States, we've been super slow. We didn't even have testing. We still don't have as much testing as we need. So we just, to put it very honestly, we just messed this up. And if people are wondering, why am I on lockdown? You're partly on lockdown because we wasted two months and didn't get a test score. And that's incredibly frustrating. It doesn't mean there's nothing else we can do now. There's a lot we can do.

But we are in this position because we wasted two months. Two months is a long time to waste in a pandemic response. Yeah. we wasted two months. Two months is a long time to waste in a pandemic response. Yeah. Now, if you look at those two differences structurally, right, in terms of what those nations' responses were, we can talk about, you know, failures of leadership in the United States on sort of an individual level, right, or those, you know, teams in the White House. But, you know, when we're looking at, hey, here's what the U.S. and Europe didn't do. Is there something structurally about how our health care infrastructures are organized?

Or, you know, is there something about how, you know, our national systems? I mean, you're not, you know, it's not like you're talking about China and South Korea, and those are very different systems of government. But, you know, what's the differences that you see there? Yeah. So part of the reason why the countries that have done very, very well is because they've had experience with other outbreaks like SARS in the past. And so I think they were a bit more attuned to this and having experienced it, they were like a bit more ready. The other part is I do want to differentiate, again, between some of the European responses and America. Look, in countries like Germany, in countries like

even the UK, which now, of course, is not actually doing a good job, but initially, other countries, they had testing up and running. Almost all those countries did a much better job than we did. The testing debacle is kind of a uniquely American problem. Like, there's no other country that's done as bad of a job on testing. But it does raise some really interesting questions about, like, why is it still relatively hard for America and Western Europe to respond to something like this compared to what a lot of Asian countries and others can do more quickly? Some of it is historical experience. Some of it is just the government's able to move much faster. But also, I think some of it is our countries just didn't take it as seriously as us. And that's really as much on us as individuals as it is on the governments.

Yeah. Well, what do the months ahead look like for you personally? What are you going to be doing and what do you think? What do you see ahead for the country's response as people are? Because right now everyone is sitting at home going, all right, literally, how long is this going to last? What is what is Monday going to be like? But then what is Monday going to be like two months from now? What does the future look like for you? Right. So let me tell you how this goes. we do what we're supposed to do well. Okay. So let me give you the positive scenario because I don't want to talk about the negative one. So life is going to be different for us for like probably 12 to 18 months. What life was like six months ago, we're not going back to that anytime

soon. But life doesn't need to look like what it is today. We can't do this for 12, 15 months, right? So what I am hoping, here's the good scenario. And if we play our cards right, we can do this, which is we get widespread testing happening across America. We figure out what the state of infection is. In communities that we don't have very high infection rates, you start letting off the brakes a little bit, let people go back to work, let kids go back to school, maybe not mass gatherings. Maybe we don't have the 100,000-person march.

We don't do that. But if bars and restaurants, maybe some of that stuff, I think, can start coming back. Comedy clubs, hopefully? My business? Comedy clubs would be at the top of my list. Before I open pools, I'm going to open up. People need us! If I had the power. So we start opening some stuff up in some communities, but it won't be everywhere. Places that might

have high infection rates, you may need to wait a little longer until you feel like you really got it. During that time, we're putting a ton of resources into getting our hospitals and healthcare systems ready. Look, hospitals are going to get slammed. And what is going to happen is they're going to run out of personal protective equipment. Doctors and nurses are going to start getting sick. ICU beds are going to... So we got to work on that. We work on that. Things start calming down a little bit. I am hoping that actually as we go into the summer, spring and summer months, the infection rates are relatively low. I could imagine in some communities you get a spike and what you do is you close down schools and work very quickly. You say, look, guys, it's going to be a two week close. We may have a some of those, but they won't be like the 18-month close.

They might be short-term closes. Then, over the summer, we prepare for the fall. Preparing for the fall means the whole country has got to get focused because the fall is going to come and the infections are going to come back, and we can actually be ahead of it. Right now, we are playing catch-up because, again, two months is a very long time to waste. If we now then use the summer months to get ready for the fall, when the infection comes back, we're going to be in much better shape.

We're not going to have to do mass closings. It's going to be a hard 2020. 2020 is not going to be a normal year. But we get through this. Not a lot of people die. Some of the economic activity comes back. 2021, we get a solution. We're good to go.

That can happen. But it's going to be hard. And we're going to have a few more times where we'll be like, I can't believe the schools are closing again or the work is closing again. We may have some of those. But if we don't do it, then we're looking for like 18 months of just hell. And we don't want that. And we don't need to do it. We've got the ability to

not do that. Yeah. Can you paint a picture for me of the bad case scenario? Because I really do think it's important for people to have it in mind because otherwise they tend to dismiss, oh, it's being overhyped, et cetera. And so what does that look like? Yeah. So I'll tell you, there was a report two days ago, Imperial College in London, one of the best places in the world to do this kind of work, puts out a report of what they think is the most likely scenario for America and the UK. And I'll just talk about America. They lay out a scenario where basically if we don't do much, two and a half million Americans die. Just to give you a perspective, that's like four times as many people die of heart disease in America. It's just a massive number. All of our hospitals are completely

overrun with people with COVID. That means if you're going to have a baby, you can't go to the hospital because there's going to be no beds. If you get into a car accident, there ain't no hospital beds for you. The hospitals are going to be, and they paint a picture of if we do nothing, 20, 25% of our doctors will get infected and nurses, they're going to get sick, they're not going to be around. It's a very bleak picture. And it is a picture of if we decide not to take this thing seriously, we all go back to our normal activity, everything goes back to normal, it's going to be a mess. It's going to be an economic mess. It's going to be a huge health mess. And if you think, well, it'll only affect a certain population, not true. It'll affect all of us. I don't worry about that scenario, even though they say it's the most likely scenario, because I think we're smarter than that. We're not going to do that. I know what we have to do is painful, but we're not going to let that happen. We're Americans, and I'm much more optimistic that we're going to figure out how to beat that approach or that scenario.

I mean, yeah, I do have to say that over the last week, the amount of response that I've seen from people, just the people I'm in contact with, everyone getting on the same page, so many workplaces closing, people working from home, people accepting the new reality, being baffled by it, saying, I can't believe this. But doing it impressed me. I know there's lots of people out there who are not, but for that reversal, I mean, it was only a week ago the NBA season was canceled, which to me was day zero in a way. And then the next day we were going, hey, maybe we should do optional work from home. And the next day it was mandatory work from home. And the next

day it was like, oh, wow, I'm not going to leave my house. And it took a couple more days for the message to get out wide, but it does feel like people have gotten the message very quickly, as opposed to say, you know, climate change is like a much longer timescale, right? But it's the degree to which it's been hard to make that society-wide change. This has seemed to happen in a swifter way. I agree. I think it's been awesome. I have, like a week ago, I was out there saying, we got to do this, this, and this. I feel like a week ago I was out there saying we got to do this this and this I feel like we've made so much progress this is why I don't believe the worst case scenario because I believe that you know like nobody wants to be stuck at home nobody loves the fact that

restaurants and bars are closed but I think people understand that there is a real cost if we don't do these kinds of things and I've seen people react and respond in a very good way. So I remain very optimistic that we can do the right things that we need to do to get through the next few weeks and few months. But it is going to be hard. Like, let's say things get relaxed in a couple of weeks and some places open up again. I can promise people it won't be the last time things will close until we get either some really good treatments or we get a great vaccine.

We're going to continue just battling this thing until we're through it. And what you're really describing is in the best case scenario, even it's a it's us putting ourselves on like a wartime footing and a wartime mentality where, Hey, life is going to be different. We're all going to have to change the way that we live in massive ways. Some industries are going to be completely shut down for a long time. Live sports, for example, is, I mean, this is the kind of shutdowns you would see during a war for, you know, when they had to shut down Major League Baseball and, you know, the people had to make do. Right. It really is that kind of world we're living in.

I think it's hard for me to see how we have, you know, live sports, football, baseball, all of those in the next six to 12 months. Look, we could end up suppressing this virus enough. Again, fabulous therapy. Fabulous therapy won't stop the spread, but it'll potentially make it much milder. You can imagine that under certain circumstances, but things would have to go very, very well for that to happen. My guess is we're probably in for a year of a very different life. And then I think things can return back to normal once we have a really effective vaccine.

But until then, we're in for a bit of a slog. But I think we can get a lot of our life back, not all of it. But I think we can get a lot of our life back if we're willing to kind of go through some of these processes and stay home when we need to. And once we get our testing up and running so that we actually know who's got the infection and doesn't. Yeah. Well, okay. I'm going to let you get back to your important work, but I just have one last question for folks sitting at home worrying about themselves, right? Worrying, they're sitting there going, wait, I feel a tickle in the back of my throat. What do I do? They're saying, what happens if I get the disease? What are my prospects? And they're saying, you know, can I really not invite

friends over, right? All those sorts of questions. I'm sure you've been feeling plenty of calls from worried relatives and friends. What do you tell them and what do you tell our listeners? Yeah. So let's talk about two different things. What happens if you feel that tick on the back of your throat and then can you really not hang out with your friends? So on the first one, what I would say is most people are going to do fine. So like, relax. If you feel like you have a fever, check your temperature. If you have a cough, call your doctor. Don't pick up, don't go into the emergency department. First of all, they probably won't be able to test you. And second, you're going to, you might actually pick it up from somebody who's there. So don't do that. Like call your doctor, talk to your doctor and figure out if you're high risk.

For folks who don't have a doctor to call, which is many, many people who, many people say like, Hey, I don't, I call my doctor's office and I get the secretary and I never hear from the doctor, right. Who maybe don't have that relationship. Do you have advice for those folks? Yeah. So first of all, if you do have a doctor, even if you don't have a great relationship, those doctors are now on a very different footing as well. And they know that they need to do video calls and they need to get back to you and they need to talk to you because they're not going into their own office right now. So hopefully it'll be a very different thing. But if you don't have a doctor at all, that is a challenge, of course. And, you know, people are going to start reaching out to things

like minute clinics or all these online things, doctors on demand, other stuff popping up. The bottom line is this is not the time to go to the emergency department unless you're really at death's door. Obviously, if you've been in an accident, you're having a heart attack, go. But other than that, don't do it because your chances of picking up something is actually greater than chances of having it. Second, if you're really high risk or once we have more testing available, they'll send you someplace where you can go get tested. If you don't have it, great.

If you do have it, you've got to quarantine yourself. You've got to isolate yourself so you don't give it, great. If you do have it, like you got to quarantine yourself, you got to isolate yourself so you don't give it to other people. But most people with the infection, especially if they're young and healthy, will do okay. And that's the good news. And if you're one of those people who doesn't, then you got to go in and get taken care of. In terms of hanging out and bringing your friends over, here's my advice. Just give it another week to 10 days until we sort out where we are. So like, please, please, please, in the next week, 10 days, just FaceTime with people, do other things, but do not go hanging out with your friends. In a week to 10 days, we'll have a much better sense of how bad a situation we're in,

and then we can make decisions based on data and evidence. Right now, we're all kind of flying a little bit blindly here, and it's really important that people hang out at home and not do all that much socializing. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. I won't say that everything you said put my mind at ease, but it does make me feel better to hear the real story from someone who really knows and to get it told straight. And I'm sure many of our listeners benefit from that as well. And I really appreciate you taking the time. Hey, Adam, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Well, I want to thank Dr. Jha one more time for coming on the show, taking time out of his busy schedule to share this vital life-saving information with us. That is it for us this time on Factually. We're going to have another episode for you on Wednesday, and we are going to bring as many episodes and experts as we can to bear on the topic of coronavirus. At the same time, we're going to keep running awesome general knowledge interviews with interesting experts around the world to keep

you entertained and informed while you're cooped up inside. I want to thank our superstar researcher, Sam Roudman, who booked Dr. Jha on the show. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song. I want to thank you for listening and being a part of the community of people who listen to this podcast. We'll be back with you for another episode of Factually on Wednesday. Stay safe and keep washing those hands.