Hello everybody. Welcome to Story Collider's Stories of COVID-19. If you've been listening to Story Clyder for a while, you know that for the past decade, we have brought you hundreds of true personal stories about how science has affected our lives.

Since March, science has been affecting all of our lives in a big way, in the form of COVID-19.

So over the next few months, we'll be presenting this very special series of stories centered around the pandemic.

StoryClider team has spent the last few months gathering and producing stories from all across the spectrum of experience of this global event.

These stories come from all across the United States, from Canada, Brazil, India, France, and the UK.

And while of course these are still true personal stories about

science as we have always shared with you, they're different from anything that we've shared

with you before. First of all, because we're obviously no longer recording our stories at live

events. We're improvising studio recordings remotely in our storytellers' homes, asking them to shut themselves

in walk in closets or huddle under blankets to get podcast quality sound for all of you, our listeners,

while we monitor the audio remotely from our screens. In some cases, we're only able to get a

smartphone quality recording, so we'll ask for your patience and understanding with that.

But these stories are also

different in another crucial way. They are fresher than any stories we've ever recorded before.

These storytellers have taken on the difficult task of rapidly processing very recent, sometimes

traumatic events in their lives in order to make them into stories that can be shared with all of you.

These stories are raw. Some of them are intense, packed with genuine emotion.

Some of them capture small moments of beauty, tragedy, and comedy that have happened over these past few months.

And together they all paint a vibrant, powerful, and I think hopeful picture of humanity during this time.

And because so many of us right now are struggling with what the pandemic will mean for our daily lives and our future,

we're also going to include with each episode an interview with a relevant expert who can help us connect these personal stories to the bigger picture of the pandemic's impact on our culture and society.

Each of these episodes will be in two parts, running Friday and Monday.

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