Friday's Elk, March 29, 2020

Greetings from lockdown.

Four weeks ago, I wrote in shock about 100,000 cases of Covid-19 around the world. As of today, there are 691,867. The United States has overtaken China as the nation with the most cases (125,313), and the exponential curves in states across the country foretell many, many more cases to come. So far, 2,201 people have died of Covid-19. More will die. How many is in part up to us.

As a country, we failed to take this virus seriously in a timely fashion. Closing off travel from China bought us some time, but then we did little with it. We didn't quickly roll out aggressive testing like South Korea and other countries, where this knowledge has allowed them to keep their outbreaks under far better control. We didn't deploy huge amounts of protective equipment in advance to the health care workers who would be facing a vast wave of infected patients. Now, in the richest country in the world, they're resorting to garbage bags. Rather than get ahead of the outbreak with lockdowns, we waited until the outbreak was impossible to ignore. That's like ignoring a sofa on fire because it would be more convenient to wait till the whole living room is in flames before doing anything.

Now we have to resort to drastic measures across much of the country. If we stick with them for the necessary duration, they will flatten the curve. But there's no question that economic devastation has come with them. Still, trying to go back to business as usual before the curve flattens and before we have a better way to track new infections would spell even greater economic hardship.

So what do we do? We can't turn back time. The best we can do right now is roll out a plan to restore public health and then revive the economy. Just this morning (March 29), a team of experts including former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, and Johns Hopkins public health scholars published one such road map. Whether anyone in power pays attention to these carefully considered plans remains to be seen.

For science writers, this is a strange time. Suddenly, people have developed a fierce appetite for news about virus biology. At the same time, getting out good information has become even more difficult than normal because of all the nonsense circulating on social media. Some of it is no doubt delivered by people with bad intentions. But I suspect that most of it is spread by people who desperately want to help their friends and family. In these trying times, a Facebook post from a friend of a friend of a friend who's a doctor in Taiwan about holding your breath to see if you have covid-19 may seem legit. But it's not.

If you have some free lockdown down tomorrow, Monday March 30 at 12pm EDT, you can join me and two fellow science writers for a Reddit AMA on these issues. I'll be with Helen Branswell, disease reporter extraordinaire at Stat, and Laura Helmuth, science/health editor at the Washington Post and incoming editor in chief at Scientific American. You can ask us anything about journalism in the age of the coronavirus.

As for myself, I've spent much of the past four weeks pitching in with the coronavirus coverage at the Times:

How Coronavirus Hijacks Your Cells. It was a privilege to work with the amazing designer Jonathan Corum on this visual explainer. We will be doing more.

Hundreds Of Scientists Scramble To Find A Coronavirus Treatment. I take a close look at one of the more ambitious attempts to probe the biology of the coronavirus to find an antiviral drug that can stop it.

Scientists Identify 69 Drugs To Test Against The Coronavirus. This is the sequel to the previous piece. I spoke to Brian Lehrer on WNYC about it (and took a lot of listener questions about covid-19).

Welcome To The Virosphere: SARS-CoV-2, the cause of covid-19, is just the latest virus to get a name. There may actually be trillions of species of viruses left to be discovered. Perhaps one of them will cause the next covid-19. It might make sense to get to know it first!

A Kids' Guide to Coronavirus. The Daily, the podcast of the Times, has been doing lots of great covid-19 episodes. On Friday, I joined host Michael Barbaro to answer questions from children about the virus. Kids know how to get to the heart of the matter...

Here are three of my own favorite pieces by other journalists (there are so many to choose from):  

What we’ve learned about the coronavirus — and what we still need to know. Helen Branswell, Stat.

The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinding the U.S. to Covid-19. Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough, Sheila Kaplan, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland. The New York Times.

How the Pandemic Will End. Ed Yong, The Atlantic.


That's all for now. Wash your hands, stay at home, keep six feet from others, and stay safe.

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Best wishes, Carl