Welcome to Star Talk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

Welcome to Star Talk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal

astrophysicist and of course your host.

We are returning to our sort of medical professional in chief,

Dr. Irwin Redliner. You may remember him from a previous episode.

He's the director of Columbia University's National Center for

Disaster Preparedness. He's also a professor at Columbia University's

Medical School. This is being recorded on April 23rd.

Of course you need to date everything that involves a discussion about the coronavirus

because things change daily.

We just want to get an update on that last conversation we've had with him,

which was in fact back on March 3rd, which seems like forever ago.

Was it after then or before then was officially declared a pandemic?

I think it was just before it was officially declared a pandemic by the World's Health Organization.

Are they the ones with the power to do that?

I mean could you have declared it a pandemic without a government?

Well, I did, but nobody cared, but yes, I did.

But no, but people were already thinking that it should have been declared a

pandemic before WHO stated so. And there was a lot of reluctance, by the way,

because once you say we have a global pandemic and a global emergency,

...