Science Vs - Coronavirus: When Will It End?

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

In the U.S. we've been social distancing for a few weeks now, and the question on everyone’s mind is: When can we go back to “normal”? And what’s happening in China, where they’ve already lifted the lockdown? To find out, we talk to Dr. Swapnil Mishra, part of the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team, and Dr. Franz-Josef Schmitt.  Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/2y5nJtc You can listen to The Journal’s full interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci here: https://spoti.fi/2x99xQ8 This episode was produced by Sinduja Srinivasan, Wendy Zukerman, Laura Morris, Michelle Dang, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and Meg Driscoll. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Lexi Krupp. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, Michael te Vrugt and others. And special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the show, when will this end? How soon could life go back to normal? In the US, we've been hearing all kinds of different dates. At first, President Trump was saying that we could be back to business as usual by mid-April. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter. But then it was clear that wasn't happening. We will be extending our guidelines to April 30th. Since then, all sorts of dates have been flying around. May 4th.

Mid-May at the earliest. Broadway is extending its shutdown to June 7th. And some politicians are just throwing their hands in the air. Everybody wants to know one thing. When is it over? Nobody knows. But outside the US, we're hearing that some places are at the end of this. Like just this week, Wuhan, the epicentre of this outbreak,

lifted their heavy restrictions. Tonight, 76 days later, Wuhan ends its lockdown. Around 65,000 people have left Wuhan on trains and planes within hours of that lockdown ending. Residents are finally free to do that most simple of things, walk the streets once more. On today's show, is China really done with this coronavirus? And what does this mean for the rest of us? How long could it be until we get our lives back? To help sort through these questions, we first called up Dr Swapnil Mishra at Imperial College London.

And he told us, well, one of the tough things here is that a lot of countries, like the US, got a late start. It has become very difficult to contain it now, right? It's almost like every country, it was said, oh, no, no, no, we should be fine, we should be fine, we should be fine. But then suddenly after two weeks, everybody realized, oh shit, we are not in a good state. To find out if we can get into a good state, Swapnil and his colleagues are building models based around what we know about this pandemic. And these models are reaching high places. Word is that Boris Johnson started taking this pandemic seriously once he saw a model from Swapnil's colleagues showing how many Britons would die if the country didn't take measures

to stop it. How did your team feel when Boris Johnson took the model of, you know, of your colleagues, and that was what inspired him to change? We felt vindicated, that was the first thing. And we felt, thank God, at least they have agreed to us now, and we will have something that might help us to literally save people. So we felt vindicated. Recently, Swapnil's team started looking at whether the measures that countries are taking to stop this coronavirus, or this social distancing, is actually working and putting us on the path

out of this. They created a model which looked at how quickly this virus is spreading and the death rate. And then they looked at 11 European countries, places like Italy, Spain, France and Germany. They then created a couple of scenarios. One, what if these countries had done nothing, business as usual? And then two, what actually happened after they social distanced? So what did they find? It was very much evident that the steps

like social distancing, stopping schools, having a lockdown, has helped to control epidemic. It flattened the curve. Yeah, so it has flattened the curve. So for example, according to Swapnil's model, by starting these measures in mid-March, Italy averted almost 40,000 deaths by the end of that month. The model also calculated that social distancing saved lives in other countries too.

Now, this is a model, but evidence from the real world is starting to show something similar. Just this week, the World Health Organisation in Europe said that they're noticing these trends. Countries that put in strong restrictive measures, like Germany and Spain, they're seeing drops in the rate of cases and deaths. Compare that with, say, Sweden, who have been more lax. They're now seeing a fresh surge of cases. So on the whole, for the countries that have done lockdowns...

Flattening the curve is happening, but we still need some more time. But how much more time? When does life go back to normal? So when will it end is literally a question that we really don't have much idea on right now. So if you had to bet, like me and my friends, we were all guessing when we thought we would go back to our normal lives.

What do you think? So, okay, this is just what I think. We might have to be under a lot of measures at least up till June. June. At least, at least, right? It is not at most, it is at least. Oh, right. Okay, so if we don't really know when this will end,

what are the clues we should be looking for? To know that we're heading out of the woods. Our friends over at the Journal podcast talked with Dr. Anthony Fauci. He's part of the Coronavirus Task Force advising the president. You know who he is. Anyway, Anthony says that we need to start looking for a drop in the numbers. You have to see a really steep decline on a day-by-day basis. What you don't want to see is a little sawtooth up and down, up and down,

that looks like it might be trending down. It's not like it's trending down. It's got a like steep going down. And when you see that, then you could start thinking about that. But you got to make sure you're absolutely going in the right direction. When Anthony talks about numbers going down, he's talking about new cases. Now, that can't tell you the whole story, though, because testing in America has been so higgledy-piggledy that it's really hard to know if we're capturing all the people who just got infected. So there's other clues that we can look at to see if we're almost out of this.

Like, you can look at hospitalisations or the death rate. Now, Anthony says that something to keep in mind with the death rate is that there's a two- to three-week lag between someone getting sick and then dying. So deaths are the last thing that stop. When the deaths stop, then you know you're in good shape. In Wuhan, new cases and deaths had been dropping consistently for about five weeks before China lifted the restrictions. Over here in the U.S., it's early

days, and in many states, cases and deaths are still on the rise. But here's a promising sign. In New York, the governor says that hospitalizations are slowing down. Okay, so once we have more good signs like this and new infections and deaths are definitely going down, we might see things start to open up. But Anthony told the Journal that won't mean that life will go back to normal. Right now, it's all physical separation.

Six feet distance, no restaurants, no bars, no sports events. When you gradually come back, you don't jump into it with both feet. You say, you know, what are the things that you could still do and still approach normal? One of them is absolute compulsive hand washing. The other one is you don't ever shake anybody's hands. That's clear. I could see in certain places people saying, hey, we're going to get back to normal. But guess what? We have a restaurant that has 200 seats. That's too much.

That's a big restaurant. I don't like big restaurants. Has 50 seats. We're going to only let 25 people in at the same time. Anthony says we'll have to be on the lookout for cases popping back up and that means we'll still have to keep our distance or maybe we have to forget about basketball for a little while only play ping pong you know because it's more than six feet apart

okay he didn't suggest that one but bottom line is it's going to be gradual it's not going to be all or none the big question, though, will that be enough to stop this disease coming back? After the break, the extreme steps that other places are taking to try to stop this virus for good. Welcome back. We just found out that social distancing seems to be working in Europe, but we'll still have to wait until we see steady drops in stuff like infection rates here in the US

before we can lift some of our most strict social distancing rules. And it's important to remember that even when that happens, it won't mean that life goes back to the way it was before straight away. So what might our new life look like? We called up a friend in Wuhan, China, Chan. Hello, Wendy. Hi, how are you? Hi. We spoke to Chan about a month ago. You might remember she likes baking desserts. I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Well, now we've switched. I'm now at home, stuck at home, and you're free. Yeah. How long was it in total?

About two months. But now it feels like life gets back to normal gradually. So what was the first thing you did when you left the house? I I drove to work. You went to work? Yeah and my dad are extremely excited and happy because he can finally go outside to work. After two months of eating at home, Chan is excited about sitting in a restaurant and eating pizza. She's looking forward to seeing friends and going to the movies. I really want to see Mulan. Oh yeah, I really want to see Mulan too. Yes. And how is the feeling? Are people nervous or happy? Yeah.

It feels like it's really complicated. It's a mixed mood of happy and it feels like we're lucky survivors of a disaster. Oh, wow. Yeah, it feels like we're lucky survivors. Yeah. But China is far from declaring a victory over this pandemic. The big concern is that cases could pop back up like another Fast and the Furious movie and the disease would spread again.

So China is taking new steps to track cases, including having people download an app on their phone. The app uses GPS data and health records to try to figure out how likely people are to be infected with this coronavirus. And people get assigned a QR code, red, yellow, or green. If someone has had contact with an infected person, visited a virus hotspot, or reported having symptoms, they could get a yellow or red QR code. But if none of those things happened to you recently, you'll be green, like Chan.

I have a green QR. I'm healthy. Where do you have to show your green QR code? Every public place, you need to scan a QR code. When you go to the subway, the markets, offices, some apartment buildings, you have to scan your QR code. If you're red, you can't get in. What do you think of that? I think it makes people feel safe. You know, the people surrounding you are healthy. So for Chan, this is comforting. She can go watch Mulan and not worry about someone coughing behind her.

But other people, they might not like it so much. The government tracking your moves. It's all pretty extreme. Do we really have to go this far to keep this virus at bay once we finish social distancing? To find out, we called up a researcher at Martin Luther University of Heilwittenberg in Germany, whose name is... Franz Josef. In fact, in Berlin, lots of people call me FJ.

But my real name is Franz Josef Schmidt. FJ says the thing that China is trying to avoid with their QR code is getting stuck in cycle after cycle of social distancing. If you would go back to your normal life, it would immediately start to rise again. And it would be so easy for cases to go back up. Even if we had practically no cases in the US. Just imagine, some infected yank living in London flies back home and then goes to a Broadway show.

Bam, it's back. And then we have to shut down again, wait until it's going down again, open up. It's going up again, it's going down. That would be this wave-like behaviour. And some experts, including FJ, reckon that if we can't quickly track and isolate new cases, then we really might have to do waves of social distancing. Basically, until enough of us get immunity or we have a vaccine, whichever comes first. And this is exactly the thing we don't want, lurching in and out of heavy social distancing.

China is trying to avoid this by using things like this app with the QR code to track infections. And it's not just China. Other countries like Singapore and South Korea, they're also trying out apps to identify suspected cases and track people's movements. These are all scenarios which are not nice, but they are not so severe like this shutdown

and normal life could go on. So, bottom line, when restrictions are lifted, we think we're going to have to track basically every infected straggler that pops up and then quickly quarantine them. And while we don't know if QR code tracking is what it takes to do that, we do know one thing. To pick up infected stragglers, we need to be testing a lot of people and doing it for a while.

And that means the US still has to ramp up testing. Now, once restrictions are lifted, a big piece of this puzzle will also be up to individuals, you and me, even if we're allowed to go to the pub with our friends. If you've got a little cough, maybe a little fever, you'll need to stay at home. So this virus will not easily die off.

It's like the try to get rid of the last single grain of sand flowing in the air. And now, time for a bit of NCVC. This time, we're going down. Way down. Deep into the ocean floor. Scientists drilled 100 metres into the ocean floor. That's like 300 feet. And they found something very surprising.

Billions of bacteria living inside these really tiny cracks in the rocks. Who knew anything could survive this deep into the ocean floor? It's so hostile down there. But what's really tantalising about all this is that the rock that these bacteria are living in, it's super similar to the rocks below the surface of Mars. So the researchers say that this gives us a little hope that there may be life on Mars after all.

Billions of very, very tiny Martians living underground inside cracks in the rocks. That's Science Verses. And if you want to hear that full interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, you've got to head to the podcast, The Journal. The Journal. They're also doing just some great reporting on the coronavirus. Hey, Sintuja Srinivasan. Hi, Wendy Zuckerman.. Our amazing internet science versus. How many citations are in this week's episode? There are 52 citations in today's episode.

52. And where should people go if they want to see them? They can go to our show notes and then there's a link to our transcript. Great. Thanks so much. Ciao. This episode was produced by Sindhuja Srinivasan, me, Wendy Zuckerman, Laura Morris, Michelle Dang,

Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and Meg Driscoll. We're edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenny. Fact-checking by Lexi Krupp. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Yanir Bar-Yam, Michael Tavroot and others. A special thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.