Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris.

Okay, this is my second podcast on coronavirus.

And it is very consciously a follow-up to the one I just dropped with Nicholas Christakis.

I've done this with Dr. Amish Adalcia,

who's an infectious disease specialist affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

As many of you know, the Johns Hopkins website has become a resource for

more or less everyone on the spread of coronavirus.

And Amish has a background in infectious disease and he's helped develop US government

guidelines for the treatment of plague and botulism and anthrax.

He has edited the journal Health Security of volume on global catastrophic biological

risks.

He's a contributing author to the handbook of bioterism and disaster medicine.

So the spread of an emerging pandemic is very much in his wheelhouse.

As you'll hear, he sounds less concerned than I do.

And the reasons for that they come explicit at two points.

So I just want to flag that here so that you have an emotional barometer to the

conversation.

The first is that his estimate for the case fatality rate for coronavirus,

worst case puts it at 0.6%, which is six times worse than influenza.

But quite a bit better than the worst case scenarios being talked about elsewhere.

He definitely thinks that this is going to be considerably lower than 1% fatality.

So if true, that's obviously good news.

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