Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Many of us are feeling helpless in the face of the current pandemic, but the good news

is there things we can do right now to reduce our risk of falling seriously ill and dying

from COVID-19 and preventing even greater infectious disease threats in the future.

I've talked about the emergence of other deadly coronavirus outbreaks like SARS and

MERS, how were we able to get them under control?

MERS could be stopped because of its relatively low basic reproduction number, abbreviated

as R with little subscript 0, that's the R-NOT you may have heard about.

The reason they call it the reproduction number is because the concept goes back to the

study of human population growth, like the number of daughters on average each woman

had.

But in infectious disease, it represents the number of people a single infected individual

is expected to pass the disease along to in a susceptible population.

So R-NOT is a measure of how contagious a new pathogen is.

For the MERS coronavirus, the Middle East respiratory syndrome virus, there are not

with only about one.

So each MERS patient tended to transmit the disease to only one other person.

You can imagine how much easier a disease like that can be stopped compared to a virus

with the potential to spread exponentially, viruses like the SARS or COVID-19 coronaviruses

with an R-NOT of 2 or greater.

In the case of a virus with an R-NOT of 2, for example, unless stopped, one infected person

...