Science Vs - Coronavirus: Are We Back Where We Started?

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

We’re six months into this coronavirus pandemic, which has shaken the world and stunned scientists. What have we learned? Where are we headed? To find out, we talk to virologist Professor John Dennehy, virologist and immunologist Professor Ann Sheehy, and hospital epidemiologist Dr. Cassandra Pierre. We also check back in with Dani Schuchman, who is now three months into his recovery from Covid-19. Also: MEAT-EATING SPONGES!! Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/2CXa8GS This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, Sinduja Srinivasan, Mathilde Urfalino, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell with help from Caitlin Kenney and Alex Blumberg. Fact checking by Lexi Krupp. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. Translation help by Lisa Wang and Chiung H. Chuang. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Merrick Ekins, Dr. Joshua Santarpia, Dr. Susan Tsang, Dr. Kirsty Short, Dr. Hue and Dr. Matt Pullen. And special thanks to Laura Morris, Meg Driscoll, Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, Rose E. Reid, Luke Davenport, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against futility. We're about six months into this outbreak, and I've been thinking a lot about how it all started. For me, the first time I heard anything about this virus was in early January. A relative who works in Hong Kong had told me about this email she'd gotten warning her of this weird cluster of pneumonia cases from mainland China. There weren't many details and I didn't think much of it. Something else was on my mind.

For months, Australia has endured the most prolonged and destructive bushfire emergency in memory. I was in Australia at the time. The air was so smoky today. Someone told us that it made Melbourne the most polluted city on earth. It was just sort of stifling. And then this big rain came, the rain you're hearing now, and the air is so clear again.

I had bought a mask for the smoke, a good one, and brought it back to the States with me as this weird memento that I thought the team would get a kick out of. Curiously, some scientists now think of the beginning of this coronavirus pandemic as a kind of fire, with sparks that made it out of China and then around the world. We now think that the match was struck in November. That's probably when this virus first emerged, according to genetic analyses and patient data. And from China, it quickly spread. Recent research has found that by December, the virus was already in Europe. It was in

sewage samples in Italy, and someone in France was already infected around Christmas. Soon, the blaze came to the US. We didn't know it back then, but we now think that in January and early Feb, there was one spark from China and a couple of embers from Europe. And now, six months on, this fire is still burning. We're seeing record numbers of new cases in the US, and cases are spiking in other places too, like in Iran. It almost feels like we're back to where we were months ago. And so today, on our last episode of the season, we wanted to go back

to see what has changed and whether, maybe this time around, we can manage to put this fire out. That's all coming up after the break. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeye's. A buttermilk-battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel-cured pickles.

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On today's show, what we've learned about this virus over the last six months. Let's go back to March. The virus has spread to more than 100 countries now. On March 11th, the World Health Organization officially calls this a pandemic, and Gimlet told us to start working from home. Producers Michelle Dang and Rose Rimler met in a park in Brooklyn. Michelle needed to give Rose some stuff from the office. All right, Rose, I have the goods. And at that point, the city didn't look that different. Yeah, people are out and about. Like, there's a man walking three dogs. He's out and about.

And all the dogs are. It was, like, weird that we were just home all day, cooped up, being, like, scared and researching this thing. And then looking, coming outside, trying to get nighttime, being like, wait, people are still outside. You're like, wait, is everything fine? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, we now know that everything wasn't fine in the city. John Dennehy, a professor of virology at Queen's College, City University of New York, figured this out a little earlier than the rest of us. John was closely analysing the rising number of cases in New York and modelling where things might go. Each morning, he'd drink his coffee and sit on the couch.

I'm sitting there and I'm, you know, entering the data and just noticing the increasing trend. And, you know, with trepidation, in my gut, I had this really bad feeling about it. By mid-March, New York was reporting about 600 confirmed coronavirus cases, which didn't seem like a lot in a big city. But the speed at which this was moving freaked John out.

He could see this clear pattern. Cases were growing exponentially. He calculated that if this kept up and New York did nothing, in a month, the city would have a quarter of a million cases. I was stunned. I was like, I've never seen an exponential growth model fit so well before. Looking at the plot, I'm just like, oh my God, I could see where it was going. And I had no doubt in my mind at this point that

we were soon going to explode in New York City. We're in for some s**t. In for some s**t. I don't know if you can have swear words on me. No, you can have swear words on this. Absolutely. But John realized that we weren't just in for some s**t. We were probably already a bit screwed because his analysis was just based on how many cases we knew about. And this was early. Testing was just getting started. So John figured there were probably a lot of cases just flying under the radar. So I'm thinking this is only the tip of the iceberg. We may only see 500 cases,

but in reality, there might be 5,000 or 50,000 cases in New York. In fact, several models have since estimated that by mid-March, there could have easily been tens of thousands of cases in New York. In fact, several models have since estimated that by mid-March, there could have easily been tens of thousands of cases in New York. At first, John didn't want to freak people out. But seeing that graph changed things. At this point, I wanted to scare people. I wanted to make sure that, you know, people overreacted and tried to isolate as much as possible. So on March 15th, John tweeted out that everyone needs to start social distancing now. Quote, if it feels too early, it's the right time. If we wait, it'll be too late. And others had realized the same thing. On the very same day, New York declared it was closing schools

and restaurants and bars to try to slow the spread of the virus. And funnily enough, John was kind of ready. He'd already been stocking up. We had actually bought quite a bit of toilet paper on sale somewhere earlier. So it was you. It was you that started the run. I already had a stockpile. Though John had called for the shutdown, when it actually happened, he felt stuck, just like a lot of us at the time. I underestimated how dramatic the change would be in your lifestyle. I could no longer go to work and work in the lab. My lab was shut down. I could no longer see my friends and colleagues. I could no longer play basketball. And yet, you know, I went to a supermarket and I was really scared walking around the store. And my entire conscious thought the entire time being in the store was, am I getting

infected right now? Part of what was so scary was that back in March, there were just so many unknowns. Like this virus was so new and scientists were just starting to get a handle on it. So to be safe, we bunkered down. And that brings us to April. It's spring. The magnolia tree that I can see from my window has blossomed. I crack open an M.C. Escher puzzle and immediately regret it.

Meanwhile, the virus keeps spreading. By now, there's over 160,000 confirmed cases in the US. And parts of Europe are getting hit hard too. And a question that scientists are grappling with is how? How is this virus spreading so quickly? And then, when we got some clues, it was like... Oh my gosh, this is bad. This is Professor Anne Sheehy, a virologist and immunologist at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

And at the start of this outbreak, Anne told us that it was generally thought that the main way that this virus spreads is from sick people doing stuff like coughing. But then scientists like Anne realized, wait, that can't be the only thing going on here. I think as this was evolving and the cases were just multiplying so dramatically, it was immediately clear that there was something else going on. And it was then you sort of start to get this very uneasy feeling. How are so many people being infected? Some of the first inklings that this disease could spread when people felt perfectly fine were these studies that tested people coming off airplanes.

Remember those? They're these big metal things that fly in the air and take you on holidays. Yeah, those. Sometimes people were coming off these planes, tested, infected with coronavirus, and yet they had no symptoms at all. And I remember hearing this and thinking, something weird is going on here. Right, that's exactly right, because you don't see people coming off the plane looking, you know, like death warmed over. They seem fine.

More and more papers came out. There were case reports showing that people who never had symptoms still managed to infect their family. The Diamond Princess cruise ship had a ton of passengers who had the virus and yet didn't have symptoms. Eventually, it got to the point... Where you sort of started to get enough groups from different places in the world seeing the same kind of thing that it started to become consensus. Hey, we're pretty sure this is happening. Yeah, people could spread this even if they didn't have symptoms. And the question quickly became, how? And at first, what was tripping some scientists up is that they figured

that this virus worked in a similar way to SARS. Now, SARS mainly hangs out in your lungs. And that means that if you're the one who's sick, to infect someone around you, the virus kind of has to move from way down in your lungs, up out of your mouth. You really have to work to expel it, to spread. So you've got to cough. You really have to cough. Because otherwise, just talking for that kind of virus that's harboured in your lower respiratory tract or way down there in your lungs,

you're not going to get too much virus that's going to be aerosolised. So that was SARS. But then it became clear that this cheeky virus, it was different. It likes to replicate down in your lungs, but also higher up in your nose and throat, what's called the upper respiratory tract. So it can do both, which is very unusual. So it's like closer to your mouth,

like the virus is just hanging out closer to your mouth. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's hanging out closer than you would expect. So that means you don't have to dredge up the virus from deep in your lungs with a hefty cough to blast it out into the universe. All you need do is speak or sing or maybe even breathe and little viral particles can go into the air and possibly infect someone new. And another trick this virus has up its sleeve is that it seems to replicate very quickly before you might even feel sick. And as a virologist, Anne was pretty shocked about this. It is amazing, amazing that it replicates so quickly in the upper respiratory tract and infects somebody else before that first person even know that they're infected. That is, that is like, that's a killer right there.

The CDC now thinks that it's pretty common for people to get infected from someone who didn't have symptoms yet. They estimate that about 40% of people who got the virus were infected this way. And this idea that the virus could spread when people didn't even know they were infected, it was a turning point in the pandemic because it made the virus harder to control than we thought it was. No longer could you just tell people if you're feeling sick, stay at home. Now, we all had to be a lot more careful. And even though this was crappy news,

at least we were starting to get a handle on this virus, learn its wiles. But one thing that kept eluding us was a cure. The hunt for anything, something that could treat patients. And that's coming up just after the break. Welcome back. So as April turned into May, more and more people were getting sick. By early May, around the world, a quarter of a million people had died.

And many of us were put into quarantine, because that's the best tool we have to stop this from spreading. And this was just a really crappy time for a lot of people. For us at Science Versus, we were the lucky ones, able to just while away the time watching birds, playing music and baking bread. And what I'm watching now is this morning dog. He's going through the grass and he's like,

oh, is this a good tweak? Is this a good tweak? No, no, no, it's just a good tweak. No, picks picks one up. Oh I don't think so, I don't think so. And then they'll eventually find one of the elytics and take it back to the nest. All right let's watch. Feels important. It's like our first loaf of quarantine bread. I'll let the fire place the flowers in the vines

you bought today. For some people, not having a lot to do really ramped up their anxiety about this virus, which made it a prime time for snake oil salesmen and hucksters promising miracle cures. And this was a big problem for Dr. Cassandra Pierre. She's a doctor at Boston University School of Medicine and it all started for Cassandra when she got this message from her mom who's originally from Haiti. My mom who is also a healthcare professional,

she's a podiatrist, she sent me this WhatsApp video from a Haitian doctor and she talked about what the virus was from, how it was transmitted, how to protect yourself and I was feeling really good about this the virus was from, how it was transmitted, how to protect yourself. And I was feeling really good about this. I was like, this woman is great. This is exactly the kind of communication that we need for our communities where there's a lot of misinformation. And then she started talking about gargling. Gargling, gargling what? Yeah. So gargling with vinegar and ginger. This is a really common Haitian remedy. Like just in case?

Yeah, twice a day. Twice a day. Oh, she even had a dosage as well. But it's something that is certainly not going to protect you from COVID, unfortunately. What did you tell your mom? I told my mom, please, please do not pass this on to other family members. Don't send it to your patients. And obviously this wasn't just happening in the Haitian community. It was happening all over and people were swearing by just about anything. There were teas, hot peppers, drinking

booze was a cure at one point. There was drinking silver and bleach and eating garlic or even swallowing up huge doses of vitamins. And Cassandra just saw so many people get on board. Family members, colleagues alike were talking about vitamins. There was all sorts of information about zinc. Even your colleagues were like in the break room, like starting to down vitamins? Yeah. Now, Cassandra is not down on traditional medicines or gargling a bit of vinegar if it's not dangerous.

But the problem was that she saw people not going to the hospital or seeing a doctor because they were trying this stuff that they'd heard online. So, for example, I have spoken to some of my own patients who have had COVID, who have delayed coming in for care or getting tested. And when I asked them why they did so, they said, you know, I was taking my tea, followed the tea instructions that I heard about online. It's terrible. The other rumor that's been going around in communities of color, including the Haitian community, is that if you go into the hospital to get tested or to get treated, you will die. You won't come out. And so I had a woman who waited a week before coming in and she was actually doing what she thought she should have been doing until her children found her unresponsive, shook her awake, got her on an ambulance. And by that point, she was lucid enough to say, I don't want to go to the hospital. I don't want to die.

And had she stayed at home, she would certainly have died. She came into the hospital with an oxygen saturation of 60%. It should have been incompatible with life. You should be dead by that point. This woman went into hospital more than a month ago, and she's still there. Cassandra says she's slowly getting better. And Cassandra, she understands why people were reaching for all kinds of things that they thought would help treat the coronavirus. I think people really were wanting to try anything that they could to make themselves feel better.

And so when we have these situations, we fall back to what's comfortable and what's familiar to us. And for some people, that is teas, herbal remedies, and for some people that is vitamins. It's another way to control insecurity and uncertainty. But now that we're six months into this pandemic, there's less uncertainty about what can help treat this coronavirus and what can't. So take hydroxychloroquine. There was a lot of excitement about this at first. But now we have several studies to show that it's a bit of a dud. So one study, for example, followed hundreds of people taking it preventatively and found that it didn't make them any less likely to get coronavirus.

Another study of more than a thousand hospitalized patients found that hydroxychloroquine didn't seem to help people who were already sick either. The World Health Organization has since decided to stop testing it in clinical trials. So it looks like chloroquine's 15 minutes of fame are up. But there's actually some more promising stuff out there to help really, really sick people. Well, we have a couple of lines of treatment. We have remdesivir. We know that this does seem to reduce complications of COVID. I certainly think that remdesivir is wonderful and it's wonderful that we have it, but I don't think that it's a magical cure.

The best study we have of remdesivir so far tested the drug in about 1,000 hospitalized patients. And those who got remdesivir instead of a placebo, they got better a little faster. There's another promising drug out there, again, for very sick patients. It's a steroid called dexamethasone. So one study found that for people on a ventilator who got it,

well, they were more likely to be alive when the trial ended 28 days later. And this kind of drug works by tamping down the body's inflammatory response. So it's thought that for really sick people where perhaps their own immune system is causing more trouble than the virus, this drug could be helpful. That's really interesting because in the beginning of COVID, like in February and March, we were being actively told not to use steroids because it might compromise the body's ability to fight off the virus. But we're using it now specifically to quell the body's immune response. That is super interesting. It definitely felt like dexamethasone just like came out.

It was like the, I didn't even know it was in the race. It came out of nowhere. It came out of nowhere. Right. And there will probably be other treatments coming out of seemingly nowhere in the near future. Like we've got some early results, which look pretty good from doctors using plasma from survivors or other inflammatory drugs and even Pepsid. Yeah, the stomach acid medication. It's looking kind of promising.

Right now, there are over 1,000 clinical trials going on, testing different drugs and treatments against the coronavirus. So it's not all doom and gloom. We are making progress here. But there's one area that science is still in the dark about. And that takes us to June. Danny Shuckman is a 40-year-old with four kids. He loves going on long bike rides.

But then he got hit hard with the coronavirus. He was in hospital for a week. We interviewed Danny about three months ago. So I wanted to check in. So how are you feeling? That's always an interesting question. You know, recovering on the road to recovery. Wait, you're still not fully recovered though?

No, definitely not. It's going to be a long road to recovery. Three months and you're still not recovered. So what is a bad day for you like? So bad day is just very low of energy, right? Not really wanting to get up, get out of bed, get the day going. I know I have to, right? I've got the family, I've got work I need to do. But it's pretty much pulling myself along for the day.

And there have been the days where at lunchtime, I've just had to lie down and take a nap. Would old Daniel, like pre-coronavirus, ever have had a nap in the middle of the day? No, never. No, it was always go, go, go from, you know, the beginning of the day until time to go to sleep. Danny says these bad days are happening less and less.

But the fact that he's still not 100%, it could make sense when you look at what's going on in his lungs. Yeah, so I had a follow-up chest x-ray six, seven weeks after I was released from the hospital, and there was still scarring on the lungs that they could see from the x-ray. That scarring is hardened tissue in your lungs, and it can make it harder for a person to breathe. Now, we don't have a lot of data on how long it sticks around for. We do know that not all patients are like Danny. Some tend to recover quite quickly, but there are anecdotal reports of others who months after their infections still have problems.

The longest study that we could find followed up with about 60 patients a month after they were discharged from hospital. Around half still had lungs that weren't working at 100%. What are the doctors telling you? Are they giving you any information about what to expect? Not really. To be honest, they don't really know so much. But yeah, the question will be, I was like, great, how long is that scarring going to be there? But also, what are the effects of that scarring? Am I going to have breathing issues later on in life? Those are the scary parts. Nobody really knows. I'm just thinking in terms of how if you break a bone and then there's all these

very well-known steps. The bone has to heal, then you go into physio, then they tell you pretty much precisely. If you're on track by three months, you'll be running again. But in this case, you're at the forefront of that. Like, they don't know the physio for you. You know, they don't. Yeah. It's just, what is the word for that? Mind-boggling, I think. And that takes us to this moment right now.

In the US, things have been opening up, and generally it is not a pretty picture. Cases are going up in a whole lot of places. There were 50,000 new confirmed cases on Wednesday. And it is crappy that we are here. But at least we're not starting from scratch. Right now, we have much better testing. We have a handle on how this virus spreads and we're figuring out what treatments work and which ones don't.

We have the science and the know-how to do better this time around. So maybe we will. But I think I better order another puzzle. Just in case. We are signing off for the season. We'll be back in late August with episodes on all kinds of stuff, not just the coronavirus, we promise. But speaking of non-coronavirus stuff, it's time for some NCBC. Time for some non-coronavirus content. NCBC for short. Today, we're jumping on a ship

that's been exploring the coast of eastern Australia. Scientists on board dip these nets deep down into the ocean, about 4,000 metres. That's about 2.5 miles. And when they pulled the nets back up, they had gathered a massive haul. It was an absolute bonanza. They caught a bunch of carnivorous sponges.

These are weird-looking spindly creatures that live on the ocean floor and eat little crustaceans. But the curious thing about these sponges is that they don't have a mouth or a stomach. So how the devil do they do it? Well, they're covered in these little hooks, so when an unsuspecting creature swims close, the hooks grab them,

like an insect getting stuck on a spider's web. And once the critter is trapped, the sponge engulfs it in this kind of spongy goo and then slowly digests it. This whole process can take over a week. And here's what's cool. When these scientists hauled up their net full of carnivorous sponges, they actually discovered 17 new species. And they got to name them. And one was named after M.C. Escher. Because it was this stupid puzzle that was on grayscale

and it was basically impossible because all the columns were exactly the same. I did it, and it was glorious glorious and I felt really good about myself. Oh, the sponge. It had these hooks on it that sort of folded on themselves and the scientists were like, kind of looks like an MC Escher thing. That's Science Versus. Hi, Wendy. Hey, Rose Rimler, producer at Science Versus. Should we call up the gang? Yeah, party line.

Party line. All right, let's do Michelle first. Hello? Yeah, I'm here too. Hi. Oh, hi. Party citations. Hello?

Hello. Hi, Sanduja. Party citations, party citations. The the question is do we call meryl i don't think we can interrupt meryl's maternity leave for this as exciting as citations are blight trowel editor of science versus you want to tee us up okay yes how many citations do we have? A hundred and twenty-four. A hundred and twenty-four. And where should people go if they want to get those citations? To do the transcript in the show notes. Transcript in the show notes. Okay, good job, team. Yeah.

Good job, everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horne, Sindhuja Srinivasan, Mathilde Erfolino and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell with help from Caitlin Kenny and Alex Bloomberg. Fact-checking by Lexi Krupp.

Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Begala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Translation help by Lisa Wang and Chiang Shuang. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Merrick Eakins, Dr. Joshua Santapia, Dr. Susan Tsang,

Dr. Kirstie Short, Dr. Wei and Dr. Matt Pullen. A special thanks to Laura Morris, Meg Driscoll, Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, Rose E. Reid, and Dr. Matt Pullen. A special thanks to Laura Morris, Meg Driscoll, Chris Suter, Jack Weinstein, Rose E. Reid, Luke Davenport, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

I'll fact you in a couple of months. I am finally taking down some of my emergency pandemic food. And now like half the food has expired. So one thing that's kind of funny, it's like opening a time capsule into what I was thinking about, you know, what is that? Four months ago or whatever when this all started. And the food that I chose to get baffles me now. So, for example, a bottle, a big bottle of Kodem kosher grape juice. I cannot tell you what I was thinking.

I do not drink grape juice as a rule. Like, I don't sit around drinking grape juice. And I'm not, like, as someone who buys kosher what am I gonna do with all this kosher grape juice um all right what else have I got uh I have one can of Canada dry ginger ale Not sure what my thinking was there. Granola. And the only reason that's weird is that I don't like granola. I don't like granola. Why didn't I buy this? What was I thinking?