Breakthrough: How the Dead Are Helping the Living
Prognosis: Misconception
Bloomberg
4.1 • 838 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2021
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a secure air-locked chamber in the world’s largest research hospital, Dan Chertow and a half-dozen other scientists in astronaut-inspired protective gear are carrying out a microscopic search inside Covid-19 victims to try to unlock one of the pandemic’s biggest and most disturbing mysteries.
On this episode, Bloomberg’s Jason Gale joins the critical-care physician on his exhaustive hunt for the coronavirus in the body and brain of fatal cases. By looking for clues in the deceased, Chertow aims to understand how to treat and prevent the disease in the living, including the lingering symptoms wracking millions of Covid “long haulers.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are you looking for a new podcast about stuff related to money? |
| 0:05.3 | Well, today's your lucky day. |
| 0:07.1 | I'm Matt Levine. |
| 0:08.2 | And I'm Katie Greifeld. |
| 0:09.5 | And we are the hosts of Money Stuff, The Podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | Every Friday, we dive into the top stories about Wall Street, finance, and other stuff. |
| 0:17.9 | We have fun. We get weird, and we want you to join us. You can listen to |
| 0:22.0 | many stuff the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:30.7 | It's the early days of the pandemic in 2020, and Dr. Daniel Cherto has a new patient, |
| 0:40.8 | a 26-year-old male who was hospitalized with chest pain. |
| 0:47.1 | He did not present with the typical COVID symptoms, you know, the shortness of breath, the fever and all this other stuff. |
| 0:51.8 | It was chest discomfort. And he tested negative on multiple occasions. |
| 0:56.1 | Dan runs the Emerging Pathogen section at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. And if you're a COVID case at his lab, you're not there |
| 1:01.5 | for treatment. You're the subject of an autopsy. Dan and his team are studying this young man |
| 1:07.7 | as part of a bigger mission to figure out where in the body the coronavirus goes. |
| 1:12.1 | He thinks that by tracing the virus's path and seeing what it does, it can understand why it's |
| 1:18.0 | causing disease and how to stop it. Think of it like he's a detective trying to collect evidence |
| 1:23.9 | and looking for the ammo of a killer before it can strike again. |
| 1:28.1 | Primary questions that we're trying to address, the initial questions are really the cellular |
| 1:35.1 | distribution of the virus across the body and the brain. So in other words, exactly where does |
| 1:43.5 | the virus go? What cell types does it affect? And really, |
| 1:47.7 | really importantly, how long does the virus stay there? |
... |
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