Careful listeners of On the Media, Wesley Morris, we're looking at you.

We'll know that we released our regularly scheduled podcast Extra on Wednesday.

But to quote many people on Twitter, this week has been a very long month, and there's more to say.

So here's a second podcast extra to tide you over

until the show is released on Friday.

You're welcome.

The COVID-19 pandemic has expanded our vocabulary

with terms like social distancing and self-isolation.

In an article in Slate this week,

Jeremy Samuel Faust, who's a physician and instructor at Harvard Medical School, gave us one more, case fatality rate, or CFR. Initial reports

have the CFR for this disease at 2 to 3 percent, but Faust writes that the actual number could be much lower.

Using the cruise ship, The Diamond Princess, a unique petri dish, as his case study,

he explains that of the 3,711 people on board, at least 705 tested positive for the virus, and six people have died.

A CFR of 0.85 percent.

What makes the Diamond Princess so interesting to somebody like me

is that you know that pretty much everybody boarded the ship healthy.

And so you can look at a kind of closed system to say, how does this virus behave? And it gives

you a really interesting idea about things that you might normally not be able to detect, like how many

people actually contracted this and didn't know it. They were symptom-free or asymptomatic,

as we say, in medicine. Among those who tested positive, how many were asymptomatic?

It looks like well over half at the last time that we received an update, which is far more

than what we've been told in places like China who are sort of, you know, obviously having

...