The Daily - A Kids’ Guide to Coronavirus

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Over the last few weeks, children have called into “The Daily” with a lot of questions about the coronavirus: How did the virus get on earth? What color is coronavirus? And can dogs get it? Today, we try to answer them. Guest: Carl Zimmer, science reporter and author of the “Matter” column for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Do your children still have more questions? Here’s a guide on how to talk to them about the coronavirus.With many kids home from school, we have some tips for creating structure around your children’s school days, and some recommendations for podcasts to help keep little ones occupied — and learning.

Carl, okay, just so we can line up our audio files, we're going to simultaneously clap. Okay. Carl, do you want to do the count? Who? Me? Yes, I'm designating you as the counter. Okay. All right, I will be the counter. One, two, three. We missed. Our claps were off. Okay, on three, all right?

On three. One, two, three. I don't understand this at all. I think we got it. I think that was great. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. Hi. Hi. This is The Daily.

Hello. Hi. For the last week, we've been getting a lot of questions from kids all around the country. I just turned six on Monday. And I'm from New York City. Denver, Colorado. Tucson, Arizona. About the coronavirus.

Is it the worst virus ever? Was this inevitable? How long does it last on a basketball? Why are people so scared? Today, we tackle those questions with science writer Carl Zimmer. It's Friday, March 27th. Carl, how long have you been thinking about viruses? I've been thinking about viruses for 30 years.

Wow. I've written articles about them. I've written a book about them. And I think the reason that I just can't stop thinking about them is because they're just so good at what they do, which is making more viruses. do, which is making more viruses. And that, Carl, is why we have called upon you today, because we have been gathering dozens and dozens of questions from curious children who are trying to make sense of this moment. And so we're going to play their questions, and then we're going to have you, an expert in all things viruses,

answer those questions as best you can. So are you ready for that? I am ready. Okay. So I'm going to roll the tape on our first question. Hello, Michael. My name is Marta. I live in Alabama and I'm seven. Here's my question. How did the coronavirus get on Earth? Bye! So the coronavirus that we're all so worried about right now is just one kind of virus among many, many, many viruses. There are millions, maybe trillions of species on earth. They infect us, but they also infect every living thing. Redwood trees get viruses. Jellyfish get viruses. Mushrooms get viruses. Even some viruses get viruses. Wait, viruses get viruses? Some viruses get their own

viruses. That's true. Yes. Just goes to show that the virus way of life is a really, really successful way. Wow. So scientists think that this is such a successful way of life that it probably has been around pretty much since life began. So we're talking about maybe four billion years. As soon as there were cells that viruses could infect, there were viruses. And when did we humans discover that there were viruses? So we certainly got sick from viruses, and we knew that we were sick.

You know, people were dying of smallpox and other kinds of viruses and gave those diseases names. But they didn't know that they were dealing with something that we call a virus. And it really wasn't until the late 1800s that a Dutch scientist made a huge discovery. His name was Martinus Bjerink, and he was studying sick tobacco plants. And he wanted to understand what was making them sick. And so he would take a sick leaf, and he would mash it up in water, and then he would pour it through a filter.

And the filter was so fine that nothing could get through it, like bacteria or other big things. So he just had what looked like water. And if he injected that water into another tobacco leaf, that tobacco plant got sick too. And so he said, there's got to be something really tiny in this fluid that's making these plants sick.

And I'm going to call it a virus. He used a name from Latin, which means poison. It occurs to me that the word virus itself happens to sound kind of scary. It's an effective name. Right. He didn't really understand viruses the way we understand it, but he knew that there was something there that can make hosts sick. Well, that brings me to another question that came in. It's a question that I think a lot of us pretend to know the answer to, but we really don't. I'm Elliot from Grand Rapids. I'm four years old and a half.

And what is a virus? That is a great question. And that is a question that really puzzled scientists for a long time. So let me try to sort of get you to picture a virus. Maybe that's the easiest thing to do. Okay. So a virus is a tiny, tiny bubble or shell. And when I say tiny, I mean really tiny. If you were to take one little grain of salt and line up viruses along one side of that grain of salt, you would need hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of viruses just to go from one side of the salt grain to the other.

Of course, our bodies are made up of lots of tiny, tiny things, and those are called cells. You can think of a cell as like a Lego. You snap them together and you can make things like a heart or a brain. We have 37 trillion cells in our body, but each of those 37 trillion cells is huge compared to a virus. If you think of a virus as being the size of a soccer ball, then just one of your cells would be the size of a 40-story building. Wow. And there's not a lot of room inside of a little shell that small to put a lot of stuff.

So all that's in there is just a package of genes. And you can think of genes like instructions or a recipe. There's like a little molecular cookbook. And the recipe is how to make more viruses. But the virus doesn't have the equipment it needs to make more copies of itself. So what it has to do is it has to go find a host, whether that's a redwood tree or a jellyfish or a mushroom, and it goes

inside one of the cells of that host and forces it to make more viruses. Hi, my name is Viviana, and I live in San Mateo, California, and I have a science question about the coronavirus. Does it have, like, a specific color? Like, can you even see it, like, under a microscope? Can you see it? And if you can, do you know what color it has? Thank you, and those are all my questions. Carl, what do you say?

You can see it under a microscope, but it doesn't have color. Colors have to do with light and the way that light changes as it travels. When you get down to things as small as viruses, they're too small to have color. Huh. It's colorless. So when you see pictures of them, basically a scientist saying like, all right, I'm going to just add color so that you can see the different parts more clearly. Got it. So the most striking thing about this virus is that it has what looks like a crown.

It has these spikes going all the way around it. So think of a bubble or a ball covered in spikes. And that's actually where coronaviruses got their name, because it looks like a crown. And corona is Latin for crown. Mm-hmm. Because it looks like a crown, and corona is Latin for crown. Mm-hmm. Okay, well, one of the kids who called in wanted to better understand how that tiny little bubble

with those spikes actually gets into our bodies. Hi. Hi, Michael. My name is Hannah, and I'm age four. And I'm calling from Virginia. And why do the people have the pandemic in their body? Well, they have the virus in their body because it got in there by one of a few different ways. For example, maybe you touched a door handle right after somebody

else who was sick touched it. They left the virus on the door handle. You touched the door handle. Now it's on your hands and your nose itches. So you scratch your nose and now it goes into your nose. And once it's in your body, this little ball with the spikes, then what happens? All right, so now the virus is in your nose. Mm-hmm. Your nose is this kind of wet, slimy place. It's got a lot of mucus in there, even when you're healthy. So the virus is going to sort of float around in there.

And, you know, in a lot of cases, nothing happens. It just sort of sits there for a while, and then it kind of falls apart. It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't make you sick. But sometimes the virus does make you sick. Then what happens? The virus is floating around

in this mucusy layer in your nose and in your airway and remember this airway is made of cells the lining is millions and millions of cells what the virus needs to do is to get inside one of them

so we talked about the crown of spikes that the virus has. What happens is that those spikes are, they're actually like keys in a way. So imagine a crown of keys. And there's a lock on the surface of the cell. And that key can go in and essentially open up the cell. Basically what happens is that the virus latches onto the cell and that key can go in and essentially open up the cell.

Basically what happens is that the virus latches onto the cell using one of those spikes and is able to push into the cell itself. And now the virus is inside the cell. And once it's inside the cell, the virus takes over. It starts telling the cell what to do. So now the cell really isn't doing its job as a cell in your airway. It's become a little factory for making more viruses. This is what it means when a virus infects you. It's taking over.

So now this virus factory, one of your cells, is making millions of new viruses. These new viruses are getting packaged into bubbles, and the bubbles rise to the skin of the cell, what scientists call the membrane. And the bubble fuses to the membrane, and all of a sudden it dumps out all these new viruses. the membrane, and all of a sudden it dumps out all these new viruses. And so you have millions and millions of these new viruses that are now coursing around in your airway. And as you're breathing in and out, they will gradually make their way down, go down, down, down, and then eventually they are infecting the cells in the lungs.

Right, and a lot of kids had questions about what that process feels like. What does the virus feel like? What does it do to your body? What does it do to your body? I'm also curious to know what happens inside your body when you get COVID-19. How does the virus make you feel? Well, the virus makes you feel really bad. And the reason it makes you feel bad is that once the virus gets in the lungs,

it starts to do the same thing to your cells in the lungs. In other words, it uses that key to get inside the cells, and it hijacks the equipment inside, and it turns the whole cell into another factory for making new viruses. And so these cells, they're churning out millions and millions of viruses and they just start to wear out. They can't do this for very long. Sooner or later, the lung cells die and that can hurt. But there's another reason that you feel bad too. And that one's actually a little more surprising. What do you mean? We have something in our bodies called the immune system, which is how we defend ourselves against viruses and bacteria and other bad things.

And so you've got these immune cells that are wandering around inside your lungs, just making sure everything's okay. And if they come across viruses or infected cells, they start talking to each other and say, we have got to start a war. And so the immune system can actually make little weapons called antibodies that can fight the virus and clear it out. fight the virus, and clear it out. And so there's this big battle that starts going on inside of our bodies. In a lot of cases, when people get COVID-19, they feel a fever. Well, that's actually the immune system kind of heating up the body.

If you have a fever, actually what's happening is that your immune system is just generating a lot of heat. It's interesting. When we get a fever, it's not from the virus itself. It's from our immune system, our bodies fighting the virus. Right. If you feel achy and so on, that's also the result of a lot of molecules that your immune system are cranking out that are just making you feel lousy. It is just part of the process of the fight.

Huh. For maybe 20% of people, things get a lot worse because the immune system can't win the fight. Because the immune system can't win the fight. In fact, the immune system starts to cause more damage than good. You have to have a very precise attack to be able to take out this virus and nothing else. And our immune systems very often can do it. They're up to the job. But sometimes immune systems just are not working quite right. Maybe they get confused. Maybe they start to look at an infected cell as being this huge foreign invader and just blast a huge response against it. And that huge blast damages cells all around.

So instead of being like a sniper making a precise shot with a bullet, somebody just brings out a big cannon and just starts blasting. So ultimately, when people get really, really sick, it's largely because of the way that their own bodies are responding to the virus. Right. So this wasn't a question from a kid. It's a question from me. Why do we cough at this phase of a coronavirus infection? So at this stage of an infection, infection. So at this stage of an infection, and this is true of the flu and other viruses that infect our lungs and where we breathe, our lungs start to build up fluid. Some of that fluid is actually from dead cells. And so your lungs are just kind of starting to fill up. And so coughing is a very good way to just clear out a little bit

of obstruction. Unfortunately, coughing is also a great way to get other people sick. So one more way in which a virus seems to, as you said at the beginning of our conversation, be very good at its job. Yeah, it is taking advantage of our biology. You know, we cough to make ourselves feel better. For the virus, that's like a limousine to its next victim. We'll be right back. Okay, Carl, round two of our questions from kids. Hello, my name is Charlie Lemke. I am from Odenton, Maryland.

And I am six years old. I would like to know, how did the coronavirus start? So how did the coronavirus start? So, coronavirus started in bats. Bats, bats. Yes. Actually, a lot of viruses that infect humans originally came from animals. So HIV, for example, which causes AIDS, that came from chimpanzees. The flu came from birds. But bats, bats were where we got a number of viruses. Bats gave us SARS. Bats gave us MERS. Bats probably gave us Ebola. Wow. Now, we can only really guess how it got from a bat to a human. So, for example, people sometimes eat bats. The virus could have come out of bat droppings or bat saliva. It might have infected an animal

that people were raising for food. And then from that animal, it got into us. We really don't know yet. But what is clear is that, you know, we need to stop making such close contact with bats. Okay, and on this topic of animals, there was one question that we kept hearing over and over again. Can pets known as cats and dogs get coronavirus? Should I be worried about my pets picking up the COVID-19 or any? I'm wondering if a human can give an animal the coronavirus. Carl?

So there's no evidence that dogs or cats get sick from coronavirus. There's no evidence that dogs can, or cats can give the virus to people. But they have found some cases, not a lot, just a few cases, where somebody who's sick with COVID-19 gave the virus to their dog. So the virus is in the dog, the virus is going into cells, making new viruses, but the dog wasn't sick. And this makes sense. You know, viruses do really well going into, you know, one species or just a few species. And then in other species, they just don't do a good job at all.

So this virus might be able to get into dogs, but it doesn't seem like it becomes a threat to the dog or to its owner. Carl, you've mentioned this a couple of times. The fact that some people get quite sick from the coronavirus, others don't really get sick at all. And so we have a question about that. Hi, I'm Ezra Kushner, and I'm here from New Rochelle. Why don't kids get the coronavirus?

Yeah, that's an important question. And actually, Ezra, kids do get the virus. But there's this strange fact that kids are much, much less likely to get really sick from this virus. Why is that? Yeah, why is that? Scientists are trying to figure that out. One possibility is that, you know, kids get lots of colds. Some of those colds are caused by other coronaviruses.

So it could be that kids still have kind of a memory of those coronaviruses that recently gave them colds. And so that gives them this protection. That's one idea. There's another idea, which is that kids are just healthier in the sense that their lungs are young and undamaged. And as people get older, maybe they smoke, or maybe they just breathe in a lot of air pollution. Maybe the immune system isn't able to deliver those precise attacks as well to new viruses. Maybe that's why.

We don't know yet. Hmm. So next, Carl, we have another question from Viviana in San Mateo. Hi, this is Viviana, and I still live in San Mateo, California. So is there like any way we can come up with like a vaccine or like a medicine that like cures people? And if I might add to that question, how do you even make a vaccine? So what a vaccine does is it gives your immune system a lesson about what a virus looks like and how to fight it. And the way this works is for some viruses, all you need is a tiny little piece of the virus. That tiny little piece, it won't make them sick

because it's not a full virus, but it's just enough for the immune system to look at it and say, okay, next time I see that, I'm going to start fighting and I'm going to make weapons that can destroy this thing. And so as soon as you get sick, your immune system immediately knows what to do. But actually, designing a vaccine is really hard because you have to find exactly the right piece of the virus that's going to be able to teach the immune system well. And then you have to test them out. And you might test them in animals first, see if it helps with them. Now, in this case, it might be ferrets, of all things. Ferrets? Why ferrets? You know, it's the weirdest thing. It just so happens that ferrets have cells in their airway

that are a lot like our cells, down to the proteins that viruses use to get inside of them. So scientists are going to have to come up with these molecules and then test them in animals, and then if they feel confident, they can go to people. And that's going to take time. So Carl, this has been extremely helpful, and we're very grateful for all your time. And I want to end with what feels like the essential question of this moment. I'm Oliver. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm six years old.

My question is, why can't we go to Chuck E. Cheese when the coronavirus is around? I'm sorry, Oliver. Yeah, Chuck E. Cheese is going to have to wait. We're all wishing we could go places that we love to go to, but we have to stay away. Because when we come together at a restaurant or at a playground, we may meet somebody who has the virus. Or maybe we have the virus and don't even know it, and we could give it to them. And so by giving up Chuck E. Cheese for a while, you are helping to save people's lives. And Carl, when do you think Oliver will be able to go to a Chuck E. Cheese and play skeetball and eat pizza with his friends? I mean, I love Chuck E. Cheese. Um, it should be for a while. We should not be rushing back. We should not be telling ourselves, oh, it's all over in a week. All the scientists who study this tell us this is going to be a while.

I wish it could be quick, but it's not. There are a lot of sick people in this country, and a lot more will get sick if we just go about our normal lives. Mm-hmm. You know, just remember, like, we human beings, we have fought viruses for centuries, and we've won. We've won against a lot of them.

We have saved millions of lives. People died of smallpox. Nobody dies of smallpox anymore. We know how to fight viruses, but it's hard. And we're in a fight now where everybody has to help, including kids. Thank you, Carl. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In a day of grim developments, the United

States reported at least 81,000 cases of the coronavirus, more than any other country, including China, where the pandemic began. At the same time, the U.S. became the latest country to record more than 1,000 deaths, a figure that has quadrupled over the past week. On Thursday, the economic cost of the pandemic was reflected in new data released from the Department of Labor, which said that 3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the past week,

the largest weekly increase in U.S. history. You think about our children. This is the first time they've faced a real national adversity, right? You have a whole new generation who have never lived through anything like this. They never went to war. They were never drafted. They never went through a national crisis. And this is going to shape them. crisis and this is going to shape them. In New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo predicted that the crisis would have a deep and lasting influence on the nation's young people. And I can tell you just from having my daughters with me, yeah, they're hurt, they're scared, but they are also

learning through this. And at the end of the day, they're hurt. They're scared. But they are also learning through this. And at the end of the day, they're going to be better people for it. And they're going to be better citizens for it. I believe that because they're rising to the occasion. The Daily is made by Theo Balcom, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Annie Brown, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Doerr, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vanderploeg, Adiza Egan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Yanasambandan, Jasmine Aguilera, MJ Davis-Lynn, Austin Mitchell, Sayer Kavado, Nina Potok, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guimet, Hans Butow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoit, and more. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, and Nora Keller. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.