Science Vs - Coronavirus: More Scared or Less Scared?

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

MINI EPISODE! Tons of new science means fresh answers on a few things that really freaked us out at the start of the pandemic: coronavirus on surfaces; ibuprofen and Covid-19; and getting Covid twice.  Link to transcript: https://bit.ly/3lXu6Ca This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, Nick DelRose, and Wendy Zukerman with help from Michelle Dang and Hannah Harris Green. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell with help from Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode, and special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Wendy Zuckerman here from Science Faces. So at the beginning of this coronavirus pandemic, it felt like we didn't know anything, which kind of meant that a lot of us were freaked out by everything. But now, as we talked about last week, we've got a ton of new science, and some of it is actually quite reassuring. So we're bringing you this quick mini episode and we're calling it Is It More? Is It Less? Scary.

With me, Rose. And the Rose we're talking about is our producer, Rose Rimla. Hi, Wendy. So we're just going to quickly go through a bunch of things that we talked about earlier in the year about the coronavirus. And we're going to ask, can we retire some of our fears or must we remain terrified? Oh, geez.

And just for brevity's sake, we call that more scared or less scared. Great. Great. All right. So what are the kinds of things we're going to go through? One, coronavirus on surfaces. How scary is that? Two, ibuprofen. Is it actually dangerous to take if you have COVID? And three, can you get COVID twice? Kick us off surfaces. Back when we did our surfaces episode, things were looking pretty scary. There was a lot we didn't know, but it was like wipe down your groceries just in case. What is the actual science these days? Well, scientists seem to be coming to an agreement that getting sick from touching stuff doesn't happen very much. And we

have some idea why. So we finally have studies where scientists have swabbed a bunch of surfaces in a room, and this is mostly in hospitals with COVID patients. And then they actually look, is the virus that they scoop up still alive, quote unquote? Is it infectious? Can it get you sick? And those studies find that almost always it is not infectious anymore. So basically, even though we're finding virus on surfaces, it's usually dead. That is awesome news. Less scared. Yeah, I'm going to call this one less scared. Scientists did tell me that they hadn't ruled this out. So it's a good idea to keep cleaning and to keep washing your hands. But the real threat for getting COVID seems to be

being around people who have COVID, not being around stuff that has coronavirus on it. So fomites, not such a foe anymore. Wow. Fomite, more like foe, maybe not. Okay. Ibuprofen? What about that one? Yeah, at one point people were worried that there was like a rumor that taking ibuprofen might be bad for you if you have COVID.

It could make your sickness worse. There was never a ton of evidence that that was true. And we actually have a few studies now that have looked at the family of drugs that ibuprofen is in to see if it aggravates COVID for people. And they found that it does not. That's great. Easy, less scared. Less scared. You can be less scared of ibuprofen when it comes to COVID.

Then finally, this question of can you get the coronavirus twice? It seems like it's possible to get the coronavirus twice, but probably not that likely. We don't have too many examples of this happening, but a couple studies have tried to pin this down. So there was one in Qatar, and I did watch a youtube video on how to pronounce it i hope that's as close as i can get that what were your other options some people say cutter okay okay so in qatar what happened so in this pre preprint, they looked at more than 130,000 people who had tested positive for COVID-19. And from there, it looked at who got another positive test at least 45 days later. And so they kept winnowing that down, like who, you know, of those people, how many have like really good evidence that it probably was a reinfection and not just like the same infection lingering.

And so what they found was that only 54 people seemed like they had good evidence that they had gotten reinfected and not just like the same infection lingering. And so what they found was that only 54 people seemed like they had good evidence that they had gotten reinfected with COVID. Oh, okay. So 54 people out of 130,000. Yeah. So the authors say the risk of getting reinfected with COVID was 0.04%. So that's really rare. Well, that is good news because I feel like every time we're getting a confirmed case of reinfection, headlines bounce around the internet. It's nice to know these truly are rare.

That's what it looks like. Okay. And one thing that people had talked about at the beginning of the pandemic was the suggestion that if you did get reinfected, you'd have a milder case of COVID the second time. Is that what we're seeing? We have cases of people who get COVID a second time and the second bout is milder, but we also have cases of people who get COVID a second time and the second bout is worse. So it's just, we just don't know.

Yeah. Okay. And there's another study that's useful here. Scientists took a group of people who had COVID and then looked at their blood six months later. So they wanted to see if their blood recognized the coronavirus spike protein. Like, would it trigger an immune response? So they tested this in the lab. What they did was they got plasma out of the blood.

They mixed the plasma with the coronavirus spike protein, just like to see what happened. And it turned out that a bunch of the important immune system stuff, antibodies, B cells, T cells, that stuff in the people's blood, it did react to the spike protein. Oh, that's really great. That's six months later. At least. So bottom line, when it comes to this question of reinfection, are you more scared or less scared? Well, you know, I started out on this whole coronavirus journey. I actually started out with the assumption that it would be, like,

impossible to get COVID twice. And looking back on my naive self, I think I was being a little overly optimistic. But now that my expectations are more reasonable and I'm like, oh, yeah, it does make sense to think people could get it twice. It's comforting to see that it doesn't happen very often. So I think all in all, the results are hopeful here. So I'm going to go ahead and say less scared. Less scared. Well, that's three for three. Yeah.

That's pretty good. So then generally speaking, how are you feeling about the coronavirus? Full stop. Less scared, more scared. More scared. Oh. Doesn't make any sense, does it? I'm not more scared of it as like an entity,

but I am scared because numbers are going up. Oof. Yeah. That's kind of a bummer end, huh? That's COVID. What do we want? But you know what? Knowledge is power, isn't it, Rose, as we always say on this show?

We say that constantly every day at Science Versus, repeatedly throughout the day. So I guess that's thanks. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. Is it more? Is it less scary? On Thursday, we're going to have our last episode of the season.

We're taking a trip into the science of magic mushrooms. See you there.