Stuff You Should Know - How COVID-19 Works

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

We’re in the middle of an odd, tense time and Josh and Chuck are here to explain what’s going on and how to stay safe.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the Global Nightmare. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry over there, and we are Stuff You Should Know.

That's an Alice Cooper song, right? That's welcome to my nightmare. Oh, gotcha. I think it is my nightmare, isn't it? Yeah, but he should have thought bigger. Yeah, he really should have, it was kinda short-sighted, yeah. Well put, we saw him in concert once, remember? That's right, big shout out to Neeta Strauss.

Yes, guitarist extraordinaire for Alice Cooper, among others who invited us. Yeah, science enthusiast. What enthusiast? Science. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Science enthusiast. So we should, I think everyone knows right now

that we are now set up to record apart from one another. Yes, Chuck. So my first question before we have to get serious is, what are you wearing? I knew it. Can I tell you seriously what I'm wearing? Yeah, I'm going to tell you. Oh, okay.

I am wearing an apron. And that's it? Yep. Wow. Yeah, what about you? So your cosplaying is sexy chef. Yeah, yeah, that's what I like to think of myself as. It's not really cosplay, it's kinda normal life stuff.

Yeah, I am wearing, and this is not a plug, but it is what I'm wearing. I'm wearing me undies. I'm wearing my Mack Weldon, I don't know what they call them, kind of the warm-up pants that you can go to the grocery store in. Sure, but do not go to the grocery store, Chuck. I'm not.

Okay. I'm wearing a Max FunCon 2012 t-shirt and my slippers. So basically this is your, I got all this free outfit. Boy, it really is, I paid for the slippers. Okay, but I mean, if you name drop the slippers, maybe you can get a replacement for them. I don't want to do that, even though they're super comfy,

maybe we can get a slipper sponsorship. Did you ever stop wearing slippers out of the house? Well, what do you mean? So I think it was our five-second rule episode where we talked about the point of slippers is to just have these things that are housebound and never leave your house, and then you just wear them in your house

and then instead of outside, so the outdoors germs never come inside on the bottom of your feet. Boy, that was, you're calling out like a nine-year-old episode. I will, you know, I may go get the mail or something. Okay, all right. Well, before you were going and like getting ice cream

at the convenience store and those things, if I remember correctly. Is that? Yeah, and I feel like the fact that you're not doing anymore, you may have forgotten, but that's my influence, Chuck. My influence. Or I may have just gotten gained some self-respect.

Right, there you go. I like to think both of those were my influence, okay? Yeah, so at the head of the show, I think we should announce, we're doing an episode on COVID-19. It is Tuesday, I don't even know what date it is. It's the 24th, March 24th. And this will come out on the 26th, right?

That's what Jerry's promising right now. That remains to be seen though. So it'll be sort of up to date, but two days a lot can change, as we all know. And the other thing too is, I think we are going to stay out of sort of the politics and the economics of this, because that's an almost separate podcast in itself

that I have no interest in ever doing. Well, I'm surprised to hear you say that last part. I was figuring that that would be one, we do like years from now, like go back and look at the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, because I think so many weird, remarkable, interesting things are going to grow out of this and are already going on.

I could totally see us doing that, but I can vibe on what you're saying, because after recording this, like I'm hoping that we can finish this episode and never talk about coronavirus again, like I get what you're saying. That would be great. Yeah, I'm tired of knowing about it, you know?

Yeah, and we debated quite honestly, whether or not to even do this, but it seems like we had more people asking for just a level headed take on it from us than people saying, I would really rather be distracted. So we'll distract you after today. Yeah, and we're also, I mean, we're not riding that wave

where we're like trying to feed your news addiction that like you can't get enough breaking information about this global pandemic. Like you said, we're just trying to do stuff you should know on coronavirus, on COVID-19 specifically. And we got some big help, a big assist from Dave Ruse, who initially pushed back. We had to convince him to do it, remember?

He's like, you sure people want to hear this? Yeah, we're like, yeah, we're pretty sure. We'll find out though. So thanks a lot, Dave Ruse, you did good. And also a big shout out to the Grabster too, who's been under the weather. So hang in there, Grabster. Yeah, so let's get going.

I learned a lot in the last couple of days. And the first kind of dumb thing that I learned was that COVID-19 stands for coronavirus disease 2019. Yes. Which I didn't even know that until two days ago. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, it's not talked about a lot and I didn't bother to look it up.

So yeah, and I guess it's not intuitive looking at it if you think about it. But there's other names for it too. The who, so what you just said, coronavirus disease 2019, COVID-19, that's the name of the disease. Right. There's another name for the disease

that the who calls 2019-N-COVE, okay? And then the virus itself, if you want to really show off at your next online dinner party, the virus itself is technically named SARS-COV-2. Yeah, dash, big C, little O, big V dash two. That's right. And as we'll see the reason that it is called SARS-COV-2

is because it bears a striking genetic resemblance to SARS-COV-1, I guess you could call it. Or the SARS virus that swept the world not too long ago too. Yeah, and I can't help every time I hear of SARS, I still, the first thing I think of is the Saturday Night Live sketch with Peter SARS guard. When he developed the SARS guard, SARS guard. Yeah, when did we talk about that before?

Was it the viruses one or the Spanish flu episode? Maybe, I don't think we did one on SARS, did we? No, not as far as I remember, because I don't know much about coronaviruses or I didn't until we really started researching this. But that is what COVID is, it's a coronavirus. And coronaviruses have been around for a while. They're a family of viruses

that typically cause upper respiratory infections in humans and chickens. In pigs and cows, coronaviruses usually cause diarrhea or intestinal infections. But in humans, it's usually the upper respiratory tract. Although we have seen now that coronaviruses can cause pig or cow-like infections in humans too. We've seen that recently.

But for the most part, you've probably been exposed to a coronavirus. You've probably been made sick by one. And normally coronaviruses just give us something that we would take as a cold or a common flu. Yeah, and corona means crown in both Spanish and Latin. And these images that you've seen, the illustrations of what it looks like under a microscope,

those little spikes protruding from the surface, those are kind of what, I guess how it got its name as corona. Yeah, Dave puts it here like it reminds him of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. Who by the way has a really good backstory. I was reading about him just by happenstance the other day. Pinhead?

Yeah, he's a really interesting guy. The whole reason he got into being a Cenobite in hell was he was disillusioned by the chaos of World War I and lost all faith in any meaning to life. So he started to, he just ditched this world for hell instead. Oh wow, I didn't know there was a backstory. Oh yeah, there's a bunch of it. It's kind of been built up over the course

of some of Clive Barker's novels. The movies have contributed to it. Some other people have kind of contributed to it. There's like this robust kind of mythos around that guy. It's really interesting stuff. See, I'm appreciating our asides more than ever today. Yeah, me too. It's kind of like, do we have to talk about this?

Yeah, let's talk more about movies. Have you seen the new Candyman that's coming? Are they remaking Candyman? Yeah, Jordan Peele's producing it and I saw a trailer. It looks pretty good. Did you like us? I did. I was not moved entirely by it.

I really like get out a lot more than us, but I'm a fan of Jordan Peele. I think he's got a great mind and everything, but I don't know if I was expecting more from us or I was expecting something different. I'm not sure. Well, I like to get out more for sure. Us got a little wacky, but then I think I appreciated it more.

It's like a sort of a Twilight Zone-y kind of wacky. Yeah, I guess if I had gone into it expecting that, I think I would have liked it more. Yeah, I dug it. Great acting too. Oh yeah, for sure, across the board. All right, do we have to talk about this now? Yeah, back to it.

All right, so you said that chances are that at some point you might have had a coronavirus. You might have just thought it was a cold. Novel coronaviruses, you've probably heard that in the news lately. This is different because this is an animal coronavirus that evolves and then infects a human and thus rendering it novel or new to us.

Yeah, like those other coronaviruses, the ones that give us colds or whatever, who knows how long they've been around. And it's possible they followed the exact same process that these novel coronaviruses have followed, but this novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, like you said, it's new to us. And we think that it literally just made the jump

from animal to human, possibly in a live animal food market in Wuhan, China, as recently as late December of 2019. Yeah, so there's kind of a lot to this. I think they pretty much are positive that that's what happened. They think that they have a patient zero, a 55-year-old man from the Hubei province, but they're not positive about that.

And now there's some debate about the timeline. Officially, it was December 31st, but now they're saying it may have been first detected in mid-November. The patient zero is not confirmed. They also think they have zeroed on the fact that just like in the movie Contagion, it started with a bat and then this animal,

this very strange animal that I'd never heard of before called a pangolin, has served as the intermediate host because they did genome sequencing of the virus and it has a 99% identical genome sequence to that of when it's in a human. Yeah, it's really interesting to think that if you look at a lot of the research Chuck that we're hearing about and we're learning

and just generally stuff that people walking around know about coronavirus, it has come from China doing an astounding amount of research and work on examining and trying to figure out and trying to defeat this coronavirus. So, I mean, they've definitely done a lot of work, you could say, to kind of explain to the world what's going on, even though I believe

they're pretty roundly criticized for potentially not warning the world in enough time, but I guess that's getting into that political stuff. Yeah, and just to be clear, finding a patient zero isn't so they can say, you did it, you did it. You have to pay for this. Yeah, it's helpful in trying to figure this whole thing out. That's why timelines are important.

Tracing it back to its roots is important. Since that time, China has closed down about 20,000 wildlife farms to try and curb, in part, to try and curb the pangolin trade, which is a delicacy to eat in China. But I just read today, apparently in Nigeria, they account for about 55% of the pangolin trade, and the penalty they already had in place is still the current penalty,

which is $2.70 for a first-time offender. So, there's a lot of pressure on Nigeria right now to shut down their trade as well. Wow, and yeah, pangolin is a mammal, right? But it is covered in these kind of dragon-like scales and it looks like a small anteater. It looks like a dragon had sex with an anteater. Yeah, and it's tough to look at.

It hurts my teeth looking at pangolins for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it's almost like they just shouldn't be or something. Well, I'm not going to say what I was going to say. All right, cool. So, let's talk about the spread of COVID. Okay, so the way that it's spread initially, just about, well, any zoonotic virus,

I'm not sure if all viruses start like this, but they usually typically start in an animal and it spreads through close contact between an animal, a sick animal, and human who then contracts that. It's a zoonotic transmission, right? From animal to human. Great band name. It is.

I'm surprised we haven't hit on it before. Yeah. And then, so that's an animal to person transmission. From that point on, that person's infected, they get sick, and then they transfer it to somebody who comes in close contact with them, which we'll talk more about, but these days, close contact for coronavirus and COVID-19

is considered within six feet for an extended period of time or present when somebody sneezes or coughs in a small area. And then that person can get sick. That's person to person transmission. And then the last one, and this is the one that's the hardest to deal with and the one that we're seeing right now, the stage that we've entered around the world

is what's called community spread. Yeah, that one's the scary one because that's the final stage where people get sick who, as far as they know, didn't have any contact with another sick person. Right. And this is when, you know, those very first stages of the outbreak,

it was all person to person after obviously the animal transmission. And then when it developed into community spread, that's when people started to get a little freaked out, I think. Yeah, because, I mean, they can't say, oh, I was around, you know, Timmy who's sick with this right now. So I got it from him.

It's like, I have no idea where I got this. And that makes the whole thing scary. It makes people freaked out. It makes it much more difficult to contain when people don't know where they're getting it from. And it makes you need to take much more draconian measures to prevent the spread of this stuff. It's where it starts to get out of control

is when it hits community spread. Yeah. And, you know, when you see, like, these graphic maps of how it's spread, it's really, frightening is the only word that can be used to describe how quickly this thing has taken hold. And, you know, this is stuff that everyone knows

unless you've just been under a rock or like my friend Clay about a week before this happened, he went to Nepal for a, like, two month hiking trip. Really? Wow. Yeah. I was like, well, that's your new home, buddy. I hope you like it.

Is he there still? Yeah, he's still there. Oh my gosh. Is he sick? He's having a great time. Okay, that's good. He's not sick or anything. He's just hanging out.

Yeah. I don't think he's seen a lot of people. Oh, I'll bet. I think he's deep, you know, into the woods and stuff. Well, man, that's about as good a place as you could possibly be right now. Yeah. And he was planning on being there for two months anyway.

Yes, he had a plan to trip. It may not have been two months, but I'm not sure. I mean, I am concerned about it, obviously, but he says everything's cool. Yeah, it sounds like your friend Clay may be one of the luckiest people in the world. Maybe. Wow.

Well, keep at it. Clay, you're doing social distancing right. Just go to Nepal and stay in the woods. Should we take a little break here? Yes, we should. All right, let's break him and we'll talk about some symptoms right after this. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life,

step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking about symptoms here. Um, there, it turns out, so the, the, there's like a classic set of symptoms

that they now recognize as if you have these, there's a really good chance right now that you, you have COVID-19. Um, the, the cluster of symptoms are a fever. It's usually a high fever. A dry cough is a really dead giveaway. And a dry cough is, you know, where, where you, it's almost like the back of your throat is tickling

and you can get no relief from it. And you're not like coughing up phlegm that can help get rid of that cough, or that sensation of needing to cough. That's like a dry cough. Yeah, which is really troubling right now because it's pollen season here in the United States. And dry cough for a lot of people

is a, is a regular thing every spring. So it's, uh, especially worrisome, I think for a lot of folks with allergies. Yeah, for sure. Um, and, and I keep getting like, I don't normally get allergies, but it's pretty bad this year. And I'm like, I've got not a dry cough,

but you know, a little tickle here or there. My nose is a little, maybe a little runny here there. So I'm like always really paying extra attention to that stuff. It's, it's exhausting basically. Yeah. And then the third one is, um, so you've got fever, dry cough, and then difficulty breathing,

shortness of breath, that kind of thing. And from studies, they, they've found, according to the journal of, um, uh, what does JAMA stand for? I used to know. Oh, the Journal of the American Medical Association, duh. Yeah. So JAMA, um, found that on average,

people start to display that symptom of shortness of breath within five days of the onset of the rest of their symptoms. So if you have a fever, if you have a dry cough and after a few days, you start to develop a shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, you're a really good candidate to get tested for COVID

and maybe need to go to the hospital. Yeah. And I've seen, um, I've seen the, the chess thing described from people who have coronavirus or COVID-19 as everything from, you know, a 50 pound weight on your chest to, uh, Good Lord.

to a belt strapped around their chest that just keeps getting tighter and tighter that you can't unloosen. That sounds awful. Yeah. It sounds very specific. Um, if you feel actual severe pain and pressure in your chest,

um, if you have bluish lips or a bluish face, Yeah, that's bad. or if all of a sudden you're, um, confused and you normally aren't confused, uh, mentally, then those are signs that they say you really need to get to the hospital right away. Yeah. For sure.

I mean, that's any time your skin or lips are blue, that's, that's a bad sign. But that's one of the big, um, signs of COVID is, is that difficulty breathing leads to a lack of oxygen, which is why everybody keeps talking about this need for ventilators. Um, part of this process of a really bad case of COVID.

We're talking about a bad case here. Um, is that you may need a ventilator to help you breathe because you're not getting enough oxygen into your lungs, breathing on your own. So that's why ventilators have been kind of like celebrity stars, um, really sought after in this,

in this, um, pandemic right now. Yeah. And why the shortage of ventilators is super scary because what you've got in that situation, and we'll talk more about, um, the biggest fear, which is overwhelming the medical system. Right. But, uh, then you have potentially mild cases,

uh, that develop into more serious and even fatal cases. Right. Yes. And that typically seems to be in seen most in people who are older. I think, uh, 65 and over is that, uh,

in graduated increased risk from that age forward. People who have compromised immune systems already. I think, um, people with diabetes are, uh, are at risk. Um, but for the most part, something like 80% of cases of COVID are relatively mild

and are going to appear to you to be just like a seasonal cold, running nose, cough, um, sore throat. Um, just, just something that you wouldn't,

wouldn't even need to like do anything more than take some medicine at home for the vast majority of cases of people who are, who have or are going to get COVID-19 are going to experience a mild case. It's actually pretty, it's, I guess what I'm trying to say is don't be freaked out. It's very rare to get these extreme cases.

That's right. Yeah. Statistics are on your side. Yeah. Um, and that's how it's treated as well in mild cases. It's treated sort of like the flu. You get rest. You have a lot of fluids.

Um, you try to manage your fever and generally and inside of a couple of weeks, you will recover in mild cases. Right. And one of the problems that I saw though, Chuck, is that when the case becomes more advanced and you have difficulty breathing, it's, it's,

um, it just kind of like wreaks havoc on your lungs and the air sacs in your lungs, the AVOLI, um, start to become damaged. And when they become damaged, they can very easily get infected and fill with fluid. And then you have pneumonia.

And that's an entirely different co-morbidity that is, um, difficult to manage that, that can kill you. Um, but also isn't necessarily going to kill you, but it's, it's another problem that they're finding can arise out of a COVID-19 infection.

Yeah. I think Dave has here down the latest statistic is about one to 3% of infections get to the secondary pneumonia. Yeah. And if that happens, you have what's called ARDS acute respiratory distress syndrome. And the scary part about ARDS is 30 to 40% of those cases end up proving fatal. Right.

Yeah. Even if you have a ventilator. Right. Um, and one of the things that's kind of confounded people, um, studying this pandemic has been like that every once in a while, a young healthy person will,

will die from this and it, it's very puzzling. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And I saw that there was a, um, an article in the Lancet from January 24th that talked about a study that found that in cases, um, where people were severely ill,

they found what's called the cytokine storm, which I know we've talked about before, but basically your body throws everything it has at this infection. And it's actually an overblown immune reaction. So, so much so that it, your body attacks its own organs and you can die from multiple organ failure. Again,

this is in the worst case scenarios, but it does explain why some younger healthy people have mysteriously died from this. They think that it's their body just overreacted to the, to the illness. Yeah. And, you know, I know that they have to report accurate findings,

but I think one of the things that is certainly not helped, um, with the social distancing is the initial news that, um, it's really only a problem if you're elderly or over a certain age. Right. And so now that I mean, since then the messaging has been really ramped up on millennials and younger people.

Um, there are stories every day now where younger people are like, Hey, I've got it. This is no joke. Please, please, please don't take this lightly. Yeah. I've seen some people doing, making videos like that and good for them for doing that.

Um, yeah. We got a lot of things wrong early on in this, in this outbreak in the United States for sure. Yes. You could say, you could say that. I just want to point out though, speaking about numbers and statistics and everything though,

is that like when we, when we talk about like the rates of mortality, which we'll talk about in a second, it's really important to remember that, you know, it, even if the mortality rate is as high as 3%, that means that 97% of people who get it recover. And one thing I've really been heartened to see Chuck is if,

just in the last couple of days, the news agencies have started to report total cases. And then next to that are recoveries. Right. And then after that are deaths. They used to just be total number of cases and deaths. Now there's a big old bar in between those two. That's recovered people who have gotten the,

the, had come down with COVID-19 and have now recovered and are no longer ill. Yeah. I mean, the fatality rate is, I've seen 4%. Dave has here. Some people place it below 1%. Some above two.

It's somewhere in that range. And if you want to compare it to SARS, SARS had a fatality rate of about 10%. But it was much more contained. So that's sort of the main difference in what we're seeing here with COVID-19. Yeah. And the, the reason why no one can say at this point what the fatality rate actually is,

in part is because the testing was so flubbed early on in the United States that, so few people were given tests that the results were skewed, right? So if you took a test for COVID-19, the chances are you had such terrible symptoms that you went to the hospital and they tested you there. Well, that totally leaves out people who had COVID-19, but had those mild cases and didn't go to the hospital. Right.

And so they didn't get a test. So this vast number of people who came down with COVID-19, and it was just like the flu or the common cold. So that their numbers weren't added to this, which makes the number of people who were tested and then died really disproportionate to the actual numbers of people who die when they have COVID-19, at least in the United States. And in South Korea,

which is held up as like this model for how to handle a pandemic from this point forward. They had plentiful widespread testing early on and throughout, and they took a lot of really good containment measures, but because they had really good testing, it became clear that the fatality rate at least in South Korea, it was 0.7%, which is still higher than a seasonal flu, which is usually about 0.1%,

but it's not nearly as high as, like you said, 4%. So our understanding of the actual fatality rate is not clear yet, but it's probably not anywhere near as high as 4%. Yeah, that's what the thinking is. And the asymptomatic individuals, they are asemps, is what I call them. That's another one of the scary parts about it, is it's hard to get accurate numbers on even the number of people that have it because there could be far more people that have it

that just don't develop the symptoms and are still spreading it because they think they're great. Right, they're an enormous problem, and that's one of the things I know we've talked about this before, but like a worst case scenario for a virus is one that infects a person but takes a while for symptoms to show up because, like you said, they're asemps walking around infecting everybody else, because they can spread it even though they don't know they're sick yet.

And by the way, Chuck, asemps, excellent band name. It's not bad, is it? And I see them all with matching Manchichi haircuts. The whole four or five piece band. Interesting. The asemps. Manchichi, was that sort of like, I remember the song ironically, but I can't picture their little fuzz heads, weren't they?

They were kind of like mop top, like the Beatles with their matching haircuts early on. It was a little like that, I guess. All right. Are you saying the Beatles were asemps? Yeah, I think that was their original name with Pete Best in Hamburg. Wow. All right, let's talk about how it spreads.

You did mention earlier, but it bears repeating. This six foot rule is because you are most likely to get infected by being sneezed around, being coughed around, and getting those airborne droplets from an infected person. Even though they do know now it can live on surfaces, and they're rapidly trying to test how long it lives on various types of surfaces, because that's a big, big deal. Yeah, and I didn't know this, an infected surface is called a fomite.

Did you know that? I don't think so. So grocery store cart handle, fomite, potentially plastic from a glove. If it's a plastic glove, fomite, it's a fomite. Yeah, cardboard. I know that they're testing cardboard a lot right now, because a lot of people, obviously, you're getting home deliveries now.

Right. And just quick little non-doctor recommendation from Dr. Chuck here. When I get a package now, I go outside with my surgical gloves on. Yeah. I open it on the front porch, and I put a fire bomb in that cardboard box. Very smart. And push it into the street. Yeah, very smart, Chuck.

No, but I don't bring that outer box inside, though, at all. No, no, no. You send it down the street, a flame in a wheelchair like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Red Dragon. Man, that was one of the creepier images in movie history, I think. It was great, especially when he hits the wall and jerks backwards. It was great. There was, I think, an NIH study that looked at fomites. It found that in the air, when somebody sneezes or coughs into the air,

that aerosolized air, or aerosolized virus, sorry, can survive for three hours in the air. Four hours on copper surfaces, 24 hours on cardboard, two to three days on plastic and stainless steel. The thing is, this was really reassuring because I, too, have been super worried about things like boxes or touching grocery carts or anything like that. CDC says that up to this point, there have been no documented cases of infection from fomites. Right.

That's huge, man. That's huge because that means that if you're not around a sick person, at least up until this point, at least documented-wise, if you haven't been around somebody who's sick, you haven't gotten it from touching something. That's a big thing that people have been talking about. It's like, don't touch your face is one way to avoid the spread, which we'll talk about. Don't touch your face after not only being around somebody, but don't touch your face after touching a cardboard box

or touching a grocery cart or something like that because it could be a fomite. But the idea that no one has gotten sick yet from a fomite, I found extraordinarily reassuring. Although it's not like we should go get cocky now and you can just do whatever, but I feel like I can relax a little bit, even though I'm going to be just as vigilant, I can be a little more relaxed about it. Yeah. I mean, you're not going to go start licking grocery cart handles like you usually do. Man, some of the tastes I've discovered are almost like the impossible colors version of tastes.

Almost something that HP Lovecraft would have trouble describing. Unnameable taste. Well, that's how you discovered the new form of umami that had previously been undiscovered. Right. Jumanji. And to be clear too, this whole cardboard box on the porch thing and the surgical gloves for me, that's A, an abundance of caution, just being like, you know, why not just leave it on the porch? Yeah.

Just because I don't know. And the surgical gloves thing and keep in mind, I really literally haven't left the house in 10 days, I don't think. But previous to that, I was wearing the gloves like when I had to run to the store to get our stuff. Just so I didn't have to sanitize my steering wheel and my car door handle and everything like that. Yeah. Every single time I did anything. It's just smart. Yeah.

It's really hard to do too. Like if you think about it, you're like, wait, but I need my hand to touch my credit card because, but then I need my gloved hand to punch in the numbers for my zip code. And like you really have to be on point to keep up with it. And even then, you're just, it's impossible to be perfect, you know? Yeah. I mean, we've been, again, we haven't been out much at all, but when we have had to be out, we're sanitizing our credit cards. When we come back, we spray our door handle and, you know, not like Howard Hughes level stuff, but just trying to be smart.

Right. Although Howard Hughes level stuff right now is not the worst idea. Like I have Kleenex boxes on my feet right now. No. No judgment, of course. So, Chuck, we were talking about how it spreads. What actually happens with this virus is once somebody coughs or sneezes or licks their hand and wipes a elevator button or something with it, that is an infected surface, although apparently people haven't gotten sick from it yet.

But more often than not, apparently you're going to get sick if you're around somebody who coughs or sneezes and you get it from that aerosolized virus. That's right. When that virus enters your body through your mouth, your nose, or your eyes, it sets up shop, usually around in your throat, which is where that dry cough starts. And the reason that those spiked proteins that form the coronavirus's crown are there is because that's how it interacts with the cell. And the way that it interacts with the cell is through an enzyme that's present on the outer membranes of most cells in the human body. And this enzyme is called furan, furan. I say furan, F-U-R-I-N. Yeah, I think so.

Furan activates that protein spike, and that's how the virus can pump its genetic information into the cell, which hijacks the cell's functions and says, you're making copies of me now, and then it just kind of spreads from there. And this is why they think that you can get things like diarrhea, like a cow or a pig, or you can suffer multiple organ failure, or it can go after other stuff is because most of the organs and systems in your body have cells that contain furan on their outer envelopes. And so the coronavirus can interact with just about any cell that has furan. Yeah, and it makes me really uncomfortable for you to talk about my outer envelopes. And diarrhea and cows and pigs in the same sentence? Yeah, it's all pretty bad.

It is a little bad. And we've talked about touching your face, which is tough for me as a nail biter and just general orally fixated individual. That six-foot distance disinfecting light switches and doorknobs and countertops surely doesn't hurt. And I know everyone has heard this a gazillion times, but we would be negligent if we didn't talk about washing your hands with soap and water, hot water for at least 20 seconds. Pretend you're a surgeon and you've seen shows about surgeons. Just pretend like you're in the MASH camp and just wash like they wash. There was no chance that we were not going to reference MASH in this episode. I know. There's different songs like the ABC song or I Don't Want No Scrubs. I guess you could sing like a surgeon if you wanted to.

Oh, that's a good one. But at least get in there for 20 seconds. We have hand washing parties at my house several times a day, even though we're not going out. We take our temperature every morning as a family. I took that trip to Philly, New York and D.C. right as this was launching to see Bonnie Prince-Billy. We went on two trains, two planes, a Penn Station in New York for God's sake, which is already the filthiest place on Earth. I was not freaking out, but I was definitely at a higher risk than the rest of my family. I've been watching stuff and tomorrow actually will be the end of my 14-day window.

Unless something really happens overnight, then I feel pretty good. Man, I'm glad to hear that. That's great. That's got to be a big relief. It is. I try not to focus on it, but my wife and daughter didn't go to Penn Station and didn't eat a Philly cheesesteak at two in the morning. I know, and yet they could have suffered for it. Yeah, totally. I think a lot of people are counting down days. I know Yumi is from this past Thursday, which is the last time her dad went out to get supplies from the grocery store. She's nervously counting to 14 from Thursday, just trying to will him not to get sick.

Everybody's got these little countdown clocks going on right now of their own. Talk about an anxious thing to do while you're sitting around in your home not leaving. Yeah, waiting for days to pass. Right, exactly. You're counting down the days in the hopes that an illness doesn't pop up in the meantime. What a strange, horrible thing for everybody to be doing right now. Yeah, absolutely. We should mention masks really quickly too. The CD says there's no need to wear a mask unless you are sick or you're caring for someone who's sick.

If you're healthy, if you're not sick, if you're keeping yourself clean, masks aren't necessary. You shouldn't go out and buy hundreds of these things. I mean, I'm not going to judge anyone if they had some and they want to wear them out. More power to you. People say that they wear them to keep from touching their face because they're orally fixated. There's something to that. The rush on buying things like surgical masks has put a dent in the medical supply chain, which is not cool. I have to say, I know we're not getting political or whatever, but I've read a New York Times article with this guy.

It was about masks and the mask shortage. One manufacturer in Texas who said, man, short of setting myself on fire in front of the White House, I've done everything I can to warn the government that we are in a really precarious position. He said, I told the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the Trump administration that we rely on like 95% of our medical masks from overseas. If a pandemic happens, we're going to be reliant on other countries who are dealing with their own stuff to send us masks. He said, that's even the case with American manufacturers who move their operations overseas for cheaper labor. In fact, there's a company that's an American company that moved their jam to France.

France, under this pandemic, said, oh, by the way, we've taken over your factory and none of these masks are leaving France. We can't send them anywhere. It's illegal. Even though you're an American company, this is in France and we just nationalized everything. This guy's been warning everybody. I can't imagine what that's like to have seen this coming so clearly and to just not be listened to, because exactly what he predicted is panned out. All right, well, let's take another break and we'll talk about containing the spread, everyone's favorite two words these days, social distancing, and a little bit more about COVID-19 right after this.

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So I just want to say everybody, I think it's laughable. Anyone, including me, who thought that I wasn't going to get political at all in this episode? Well, you indicted the past three administrations. So that's okay. That seems fair and balanced. Fair and balanced. So, uh, until we have a vaccine, uh, we can only contain COVID-19. It is about twice as contagious as the seasonal flu.

Yeah, that's a big, big, big deal. Yeah, it's very contagious. Um, and like we said, the, the, the big fear right now obviously is a loss of life. But the real, real big fear is that the medical system becomes overwhelmed and treatable infections, um, can become deadly because we don't have the resources that we need. Right. So the, the, in addition to social distancing, if that one isn't the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, Oh yeah. then flattening the curve has got to be.

It's one of those two. They're going to tie for first, probably. And I, we should probably explain what flattening the curve is for like the three people who aren't already familiar with it. Shall we? Yeah, go ahead. All right. So flattening the curve is this idea that, um, we're going to get X number of infections because this is a pandemic. A lot of people are going to get infected by coronavirus and become sick from it.

Right. But what we can manage is the time scale that that number of infections takes place over. So let's say we know that an area is going to get just statistically speaking, a thousand infections from this pandemic. It's way different to have those thousands and that thousand infections all at once over the course of one week than it is to have that same number of infections, 1000 over the course of 10 weeks. That's right. Because of the strain that it puts on medical staff and medical equipment.

We have a limited amount of medical staff and medical equipment and if they're all called for at the same time, that's a problem. But we can reuse that medical staff. We can reuse that medical equipment over the span of time. So a ventilator can support two patients who need it for a week each over the course of two weeks, but it can only support one patient of those two if they need it on the same week. So flattening the curve is all about making this number of infections that we're surely going to see spread out over time rather than happening all at once. And the main mechanism for flattening the curve is social distancing, which is just stay away from one another to cut down on that rate of infection.

Yeah. And you know what? We try to remain judgment free on the show and tell people to live their life. But this is one instance where if you are not social distancing, if you are going out to bars and restaurants and having gatherings, then you're doing a very, very bad thing right now. You're doing something extraordinarily selfish. Full stop.

And I know a lot of people are like, well, I'm young and it's not going to get me. And even if it does get me, I'm young and healthy. I'll be fine. It'll be like a cold. The problem is, is you're the same person who's going out in public and then touching an elevator button and making that person sick. Or if you're sick and you're out running around, you're coughing, you're sneezing, you're being gross and you're aerosolizing the air with the virus, which can stay viable for three hours.

So you're getting other people sick. And those other people might not survive that COVID-19 case that you've given them because they're not young and they're not healthy. And the idea that you're just flouting that is just, I think maybe blood boiling is the right term. Yeah. It really, really has been pretty upsetting to see even in my own super cool neighborhood where people seem to do the right thing most times. And on the neighborhood pages on Facebook, people are talking and doing the right thing. But, you know, even up until like a few days ago, I was driving through my little neighborhood area where the bars and restaurants are. And some of them were still full of people.

And I just like, I want to like put a loudspeaker on top of my car like in, oh, geez, why am I in Slacker in the Link Latter film and just drive around saying very bad things to people in public. When I think of loudspeakers in cars, I think of Blues Brothers. Yeah, that too. Sure. And that was probably, Slacker was probably stolen from that anyway. Gotcha. Did they use a cop car in Slacker? No, it's at the very beginning of Slacker.

There's this guy, actually he probably didn't steal it because I think it was a real dude in Austin that would just drive around sort of preaching to the masses from inside of his car. But we need that guy right now to get people in their houses, man. It's like it's a couple of weeks. Just do it. Just do it. It's easy, especially for two guys who can continue to work from home to say that. Absolutely. I don't want to give the impression that we don't have any sympathy and our hearts don't go out to people who do work at those bars and restaurants and need that money to survive.

And so staying at home and if everybody else stays at home like really deeply affects their potential to hang in there and survive, like that's not lost on us. That's not lost on anybody, I don't think. Yeah. The thing that is the most blood boiling are people who are going out and not doing anything that has any economic impact. They're just being jerks. They're like playing basketball or they're just going to the beach. That kind of stuff is what drives me the most crazy. Yeah.

Just knock it off. The heartening thing to see has been how many people are stepping up to contribute to their local favorite restaurants and bars, whether it's a GoFundMe or supporting their curbside pickups or just then mowing your favorite server, some money. That's happening all over the place to try and keep people solvent while this is going on. But the big picture is if we don't do this now, it's just going to be more drawn out and people are going to be more affected economically. So the right thing to do is just to shut it down for a little while. Yeah. I mean, from everything I've seen, what we're doing now is kind of a half hearted approach to social distancing and quarantining. Like we're getting all of the negative economic effects, but little to none of the public health benefits.

So we're doing it in the exact possible worst way right now. Yeah. I saw one doctor say that if you could literally just hit a pause button in the United States right now, there would be no COVID-19 in two weeks. Yeah. If we could freeze everybody just six feet apart for 14 days, the virus would stop in its tracks. And we've seen this is the thing. This isn't like conjecture. This isn't philosophy or modeling or anything like that.

This is based on what we've seen in other countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, China even. Japan has done a really good job of quarantining where they've basically figured out the way to contain this is extensive and widespread testing for the disease. And then really strict and really well followed a meticulous social distancing and quarantining. People taking it seriously so that you can test the people to see who have it and isolate them, quarantine them, treat them to keep them away from everybody else, and test other people as time goes on so that you can have people living a normal life because they're not sick and the people who are sick have been identified and are being quarantined and isolated while they're being treated. Yeah. I mean, it's very easy to look at a place like Singapore and look at a country like Italy who did not do it right. In America, Italy was just before us. These are two great examples of the difference that this can make.

As of today, Singapore has 558 cases. And despite that, I just saw a new announcement today that they are closing schools and closing entertainment venues just because they're really trying to be super proactive and get out in front of it. Yeah. Italy, the infection rate was almost nothing throughout February. Yeah, this is mind boggling. And then in March, it spiked to 25,000 new cases a week, two weeks later. Yeah. 25,000. These are numbers that should speak for themselves and you shouldn't have to talk people into social distancing, yet here we are.

Yeah. It's saddening. One other problem, or I guess the big problem again, is the idea that if a lot of people become sick, if you have a spike in cases like Italy saw where it suddenly goes up to 25,000 new cases a week, a lot of those people have to be hospitalized and it stretches and overtaxes and eventually overwhelms the healthcare structure in the country. And in the United States, like every town has a brand new gleaming hospital and lots of doctors, but it turns out if you look at the statistics, the United States has a paltry number of hospital beds per 1,000 people. Yeah. We have 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people, which even sounds small, but if you put it in context, it's really small. Japan and Korea have the most. They have 13.1 and 12.3 hospital beds per 1,000 people. Next is Russia at 8.1 and Germany at 8.0.

And then you go, there's a lot of countries in between Germany and the United States, which finally pops up with 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people. The problem is, that's just hospital beds. That's just a bed to put people in. That's not specialized hospital beds, like people with a bad case of COVID-19 frequently need like an ICU bed. And so already in the United States, in hard hit areas like New York, we're starting to see ICU rooms that were meant to hold one patient starting to be tripled and quadrupled up with patients who all have COVID-19. Just to try to give them the advanced level of care that they need because we don't have enough beds. And so that's why that not social distancing, why just going out and carrying on like nothing's going on is just such a ridiculously arrogant thing to do at a time like this. Yeah, and I feel like every day it's gotten a little bit better.

Like you really have to be pretty selfish and what's the word? There's a word that I can't say on the air for when you've got a lot of gumption to do something, despite everyone saying you shouldn't. Guts? Not guts, because that implies bravery. Nerve, you got a lot of nerve. Yeah, like as of today when we're recording this, which is two days before release, if you're still out doing things like that now, then you really have got a special brand of nerve. Yeah, and conversely too, we should point out to self quarantine is a gift. That's a gift you're giving other people.

Nobody's telling you there's no martial law. You're not going to be shot on site or arrested or whatever if you leave your house, if you've been exposed to COVID-19. But the official guidelines from the CDC and the World Health Organization is if you know you've been around somebody who has tested positive for COVID-19, they ask you to self quarantine for 14 days, because 14 days is the longest as far as we know that it takes for symptoms to show up. That's why people are counting down 14 days, right? So if you hang out by yourself, isolated away from everybody else like you were doing for 14 days and you don't get sick, you don't have COVID and you're not spreading it, you're not a risk factor any longer. But to stop your life and to say, I'm not going outside because I don't want to risk other people getting sick because I'm not sure if I have it or not, that is an enormous gift to give to people. And I mean, it's what you did. My friends Mitch and Patrick, you know, Dirty Mitch from the Scabies episode, he and his husband Patrick were exposed to somebody with COVID-19. They have no idea if they had it or not, but the first thing they did was self quarantine and they just committed to giving up 14 days of their life of going outside, of interacting with other people, of doing whatever, just because they didn't know.

In part because testing is not widely available in the United States. So this is the alternative. It's on us to make that decision and that choice and it is a really kind thing to do. So hats off to you too, Chuck, for doing that. Well, hats off to everyone doing the right thing. And you're right, unless you're rich and famous, it can be hard to get a test right now, which is another problem, but we're not going to go down that rabbit hole either. Right. Well, we've been at it for close to an hour. Maybe let's wrap up with some talk of vaccine. Okay. Obviously, a vaccine is the ultimate end goal for all this. There are a lot of organizations working all over the world rapidly trying to develop and test vaccines. The National Institute of Health, Walter Reed Army, Institute of Research and countless others are trying. Apparently, the government is trying to cut a lot of red tape to speed things up, but it still has to go through clinical trials.

You can't just rush something to market as much as everyone would like that. And it could take a long time, it could take up to a year to get results of these trials. I saw that the NIH vaccine trials could be in full swing by the fall. And that one has promised the mRNA-1273 because it was being developed for MERS. So they kind of had a head start. Remember, MERS is a type of novel coronavirus. So they're like, this might work for this SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. We'll find out. So hopefully, by the fall, that one might be just banging. Who knows? That's what we need is a banging, robust vaccine. Right. Lots of chains, gold chains, and I swagger to it, just banging. Yeah. And I don't think this is getting too political, although it is a little bit, but I just did a little last minute research and found out, you know, there's this drug called, what's the name of it? Chloroquine. No, Remdesivir. So this is not FDA approved for COVID-19. It's still got to go through the clinical trials, but it has been used as an emergency measure to treat a couple of cases, seemingly effectively.

And they're expecting some results from a trial in April. And I just learned yesterday, I just kind of dug into this drug. Yesterday, the FDA granted the company who makes it Gilead Sciences orphan drug status. And this is from the 1983 Orphan Drug Act, which is meant for rare diseases only. COVID-19 is obviously not, it's speeding up to not be a rare disease, but there's a little loophole in that Orphan Drug Act. If you get exclusivity, which is what happened, they granted them exclusivity to profit exclusively for seven years on this drug. If you get that in, and that designation in, before it hits that 200,000 person threshold, which means it's not a rare disease anymore, then it sticks. And so yesterday, the FDA granted Gilead Sciences exclusivity for seven years, which obviously the fear there is that it could lead to a block on supplies for generic versions. It could be super expensive. And at the end of this article that I read, I found out that a man named Joe Grogan, who serves on the White House Task Force for Coronavirus, lobbied for Gilead Sciences from 2011 to 2017, which is always a little bit concerning. And these are the guys who have come up with an antiviral drug that has shown promise to treat COVID-19.

That's right. And they have now, as of yesterday, been granted that seven-year window to profit exclusively and potentially block generic suppliers from making this. And here's the real kicker. Here's the rotten cherry on top. What? Is that they were developing this for Ebola, so it was developed with $79 million of taxpayer money. Oh, boy. And now they have been granted exclusive status for seven years. That's almost as much of a bedtime story as hearing about senators who were briefed about the pandemic and then went and sold all of their, sold a bunch of stock before the stock market crashed without telling anybody about it, while also downplaying the pandemic. Yeah, send them to jail.

Send them to jail. There was a time in this country, it wasn't very long ago, where people who did that were stripped of any honor, were basically drummed out of, out of town on a rail by irate citizens. There was a time in this country. So, man, that was grandpa Clark all the way. That's right. I suddenly just grew patches on my elbows. I think a cardigan's about to sprout out of him too. Before we wrap up, I would like just to know your biggest fear in all this. What has been your biggest fear?

Loved ones dying. That's my biggest fear. I think, you know, economics is a huge one. I'm really scared about that and the long lasting effects, people losing their jobs and just the setbacks that comes from that. But ultimately, people I love and care about dying, especially unnecessarily. The idea that we could have done some things differently and there would have been abundant medical care. That's my greatest fear. What about yours?

Well, I've seen in too many movies about domino effect type things. So, I mean, obviously worried about friends and loved ones, but my biggest fear has been worst case scenarios, which is everything from the U.S. military getting a large outbreak and somebody like, I don't know, another hostile country saying now's a great chance. Oh, geez, Chuck, I hadn't even thought about that. Or medical personnel or police forces, things getting disrupted so much with our health professionals or our people who keep us safe, that things become really scary on a citizen level. So, like, people are what scare me. Yeah.

And it becoming like the purge or something like that. Right. That's what scares me. That's great. That's great. I'm going to end on Chuck, because I mean, the whole reason we did this episode was to reassure people and then just pull the rug right out from under them at the last minute. But you know what? Having said that, I'm always consistently reminded of the ability and the will of not only Americans, but human beings to do the right thing.

And the vast, vast majority of people will come together and not go into attack mode. Yeah. I totally, I believe that. I think that people are generally good overall. Agreed. And there are definitely bad people out there, but I think the good ones outnumber them. And when pushed against the wall, the good ones can fight back pretty effectively. I agree.

Also, I mean, that kind of raises another point too that I found. It's really easy to just kind of let your mind run away and focus on all of the terrible stuff that can happen or all of the terrible stuff that is happening. And you kind of have to, you have to exercise your mind to not do that. You have to stay on top of it and remind yourself that you can also just as easily think positively too. And you got to try to do that in times like these for sure. And in times like these that make it sound like this happens every couple of years or something, like this is definitely monumental and historic and once in a lifetime, hopefully. Yeah. One other thing, if you think that you might have COVID-19, I found there's a self triage tool.

They say that if you think you have it, you should call your doctor, your hospital 911 and say, I think I have COVID-19. There's an online tool now at G-E-H-R-C-O-V-I-D-T-R-I-A-G-E dot A-K-I-D-O-L-A-B-S dot com. And it's just basically a questionnaire that says, hey, this isn't a diagnosis, but this might give you a clear view into whether you're just sitting there freaking yourself out or else if this is actually something you might need to call your doctor or your hospital about. Right. Good stuff. And hopefully all of this will be a weird, distant memory not too far from now. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, you know what?

I think instead of Listener Mail on this one, let's just encourage people to be kind to one another, be cautious, be smart, help out someone in need if you can, and just hang in there. And we have listeners right now that have COVID-19. Statistically, that's just got to be the case. So be well and please take care of one another. Yep. And think positive, everybody. Think positive. That's right.

If you want to get in touch with this while you're hanging out socially distancing, being responsible, you can send us an email. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, maybe wipe it off with some Lysol Wipes or something first, and send it to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Hey Dude, the 90s called. David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.