Friday's Elk, May 1, 2020

It's been another hard month. When I last sent out a newsletter on March 29, the United States had suffered 2,201 deaths from Covid-19. Today the total has reached 64,203.

That is the official count, but the full count is far higher. In cities like New York, the total number of deaths has jumped well above the average rate for this time of year. There aren't enough tests to go around, so we're not getting a full count of the sick. Many people are dying at home.

Still, if we hadn't gone into lockdown, many more people would have died. Unchecked, the coronavirus can spread from each infected person to three or more new hosts. That should lead to a steep exponential curve of new cases. Thanks to the lockdown and social distancing, the outbreak went through an initial burst and then flattened.

Nevertheless, far more people have died than had to. South Korea and the United States confirmed their first cases of Covid-19 on the same day in late January. Since then, South Korea has throttled its outbreak. Seoul, which is about the size of New York, has had only two deaths from Covid-19. New York has had 18,399. And hundreds of New Yorkers are still dying every day.

I suspect one reason for the difference is the bad experiences South Korea already had with coronaviruses. In 2003, they were close by the explosion of SARS in China. In 2015, another coronavirus--MERS--was imported into South Korea from the Near East. It roared through Korean hospitals, killing 38 people.

The country responded by preparing for the next pandemic, knowing it would come sooner or later. And when Covid-19 came, South Korea immeditately began testing aggressively and protecting health care workers with lots of masks and other equipment.

In the United States, we went on with life--with spring break, with Mardi Gras, and the rest of our late winter normalcy. For weeks, only people who were very sick and had traveled to China got tested. A glitch in the government's test made things worse. Large-scale testing of both people with and without symptoms would have revealed the true landscape of the disease in the United States. Instead, we assumed the few confirmed cases in February meant that there were few actual cases.

That was a staggering blunder. I've been working with other writers at the New York Times to figure out what happened while we let our guard down.

Here's a story I wrote about how scientists can read the history of Covid-19 in the virus's genome--from its origin in bats, to its spillover in China, to its spread to Europe and the United States. It turns out that a number of people in February were arriving in New York carrying the virus and then spread it around the city. Most of them, the genomes show, arrived from Europe.

That article garnered me a dubious honor: the president of the United States tweeted an error-laden attack on it. Who every thought that viral phylogeography would become a political flashpoint?

I responded by laying out the key points of the story. I doubt the president bothered to read them, but I take some consolation that a lot of people saw my tweets ended up reading the article. 

On a more hopeful note, researchers are continuing to search for new ways to treat Covid-19. On Thursday, I wrote a piece on scientists who are using a method called drug repurposing. It turns out that old drugs for schizophrenia, arthritis, and other conditions can stop the virus in its tracks, at least in cells. Now researchers are going to test some of these out in animals and people.

I also wrote about some surprising research showing how the sewers may help us decide when to reopen—and when to shut down a neighborhood instead of a whole city.

I've also continued to collaborate with the amazing designer Jonathan Corum on visual explanations of Covid-19. Here is a gene-by-gene breakdown of what we know about how the virus works its sinister magic on our cells. This Thursday, we put together a visual explanation of how the virus mutates and why we shouldn't freak out about it.

If you'd like to hear me talk about the search for Covid-19 cures, I'll be speaking at a special New York Times event on Tuesday, May 5, at 4 pm ET. Sign up here and send us your questions!

And finally, if you're a little burned out on Covid-19 coverage, check out this Radiolab episode in which I help tell the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the patron saint of keeping germs off your hands. I also spoke about She Has Her Mother's Laugh at the annual meeting of the National Academies of Sciences over the weekend--over Zoom instead of in person.

That's all for now. Stay safe!



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Best wishes, Carl