Coronavirus: Washing and Sanitizing, Science Diction, New HIV PrEP Drugs. March 13, 2020, Part 1

Science Friday

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🗓️ 13 March 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

The number of people in the U.S. confirmed to be infected with the pandemic-level respiratory coronavirus continues to rise, even as testing and diagnosis capacity continues to lag behind other nations. In the meantime, epidemiologists are urging people all over the country to take actions that help “flatten the curve,” to slow the rate of infection so the number of cases don’t overwhelm the healthcare system and make the virus even more dangerous for those who get it. And the best methods to flatten that curve? Social distancing, which means limiting your exposure to other people, including large gatherings. And, when you can’t avoid other people, it means washing your hands diligently, disinfecting door knobs, and otherwise killing virus particles—which may survive up to three days on inanimate objects, depending on conditions. There are words we use every day for common things or ideas—meme, vaccine, dinosaur—but where did those words come from? Sometimes, there’s a scientific backstory. Take the word quarantine, now in the news due to widespread infection control measures. Did you know that it comes from quarantino, a 40-day isolation period for arriving ships—which originally was a trentino, a 30-day period, established in what is now Croatia in the plague-stricken 1340’s? Science Friday’s word nerd Johanna Mayer joins Ira to talk about the origins of the word quarantine, and how she flips through science history and culture to tell us these stories in her new podcast Science Diction. The first season of Science Diction is now available! Listen and subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts. In 2012, the FDA approved the drug Truvada, the brand-name HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) that HIV negative people can take to prevent contracting the virus. The patent for Truvada is due to expire, which would allow for more generic versions of the drug. But Gilead, the manufacturer of Truvada, is releasing a second brand name PrEP called Descovy. Physician Rochelle Walensky, who is chief of the infectious disease division at Massachusetts General Hospital, is an author on a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that weighed the financial and accessibility impact that this new drug will have for patients.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about protecting yourself against the coronavirus and the mechanisms by which soap, sanitizers, and other protective measures actually work, how they fight the virus.
0:16.3	The first, the outbreak of COVID-19 is at the top of everyone's mind, of course, and the World Health Organization on Wednesday took the step of officially calling the outbreak a pandemic, something it had resisted doing up until then.
0:32.3	Joining me now to talk about that and some other stories from the week in science is Maggie Kerth, senior science reporter for 538, welcome back, Maggie.
0:41.1	Hi, thank you for having me.
0:42.5	When the WHO officially calls it a pandemic, does that pull levers, push buttons, or what does
0:48.9	that do?
0:50.2	Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of things that are coming into play right now. One of the things that is really important is the fact that, you know, we haven't had a real pandemic in the United States since the 1950s and 60s. And our health care system operates in a very different way than it did back then. And one of the things is an extreme approach to efficiency and just in time product supply.
1:16.9	So we have this health care system that is operating with no real margin for extra beds or
1:21.8	extra supplies.
1:23.5	And that is where it sort of comes down to this issue with the way that we're thinking about risk around COVID-19.
1:34.3	Because we have been trained by movies, by TV, by like all of this media that when you think outbreak, you think your own individual safety.
1:43.1	And that's not what the risk is about here. What the risk is
1:46.2	about is collective risk. It's about our health care system. It's about how you keep that system
1:53.0	from being completely overwhelmed. And that's something that we're seeing in Italy right now,
1:58.2	where they're having to decide who gets a ventilator and who doesn't.
2:02.7	Experts told me this morning, you know, this is absolutely a thing that can happen here in the
2:07.3	U.S. if we don't take these steps to slow the spread of disease now. You know, we have in the
2:12.8	whole country somewhere around 100,000 ventilators. And if COVID-19 really takes off, we would need more
2:22.2	than that, and we don't have it. And would we need other hospital items like beds and facilities?
2:29.1	Yep, beds, drugs, basically everything is kind of set up in a way that you don't have extra, because
2:37.0	if you have extra, that's going to waste. You know, researchers were telling me we literally
2:41.5	call that waste most of the time. So it's not set up for this kind of an emergency. It's set
	...

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