I'm I'm going to be. I'm going to Friday. I'm John Dankoski, sitting in for Ira Flato, and I just want to start by telling you, Ira is fine. He's just spending a week at home instead of his planned a trip to watch baseball spring training. Don't worry, he will be back next week, and hopefully, hopefully baseball will be back soon, too. Later this hour, we'll be talking with Jane Goodall. This year marks the 60th anniversary of Chimp Research in the Gombie.

But first, Americans are being told that we're living in a new normal, social distancing,

vigilant hygiene, restrictions placed on schools and businesses that will be part of our lives for quite a while. We're also hearing that the world will be different after coronavirus,

that the fabric of our society will forever be changed. And we may be starting

to see some of those changes play out right now. Here to bring us some of the stories of this new

reality is Sophie Bushwick. She's tech editor for Scientific American. Sophie, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for joining us. Thank you. First of all, let's address the news coming out this week

that people with mild or asymptomatic cases of this novel coronavirus are doing more to spread the disease than scientists' first thought. So explain this to us.

So as early as earlier this month, the health officials were saying that they thought the majority of the spread of coronavirus was coming from

people who were already showing visible symptoms. They were maybe coughing and the spraying

spit that had viruses in it on their surroundings and other issues like that. But more and more

studies have been coming out that suggests actually people with no symptoms at all could be

spreading the virus. In fact, some people who were infected with the virus and not yet showing symptoms

had what's called a higher viral load. That means there's more, they produce, so for example,

if someone were to cough and to have a droplet of saliva ago, the droplet of saliva from somebody who's not

showing symptoms would have more viruses in it than a droplet of saliva from someone who is showing

symptoms.

So this is pretty scary.

Do these people go on to have more serious symptoms later on, though?

Some of them do.

Some of them don't.

Some of them, so what we do know is that a lot of people who get infected when they're first can be tested for the virus, they might not necessarily be showing any symptoms of it. Some of them later go on to develop mild or severe symptoms. And in other cases, somebody might not realize that they could have a case so mild, they wouldn't even realize that they had been infected.

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