Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. This is a special bonus episode outside the usual weekly numbered episodes.

And you can guess why we're having this episode. It's because of the coronavirus pandemic that the world is struggling with right now.

And I thought it would be it would be useful even if very quickly and without much preparation to get some information out about the science behind it and also the steps that are being taken and that individuals should take.

There's also already a huge amount of information out there, of course. So there's plenty of places to get it. I don't think that I'm saying anything or my guest, Tara Smith, will be saying anything on this episode that is completely surprising to anyone who's been following sensible, reliable.

There's a lot of sensible, reliable sources out there, but it's very helpful to put into context to get it all into one place. And there's a lot of unreliable sources out there that maybe this can act as a corrective to.

So to put things in context, I'm recording this on the morning of Wednesday, March 18th. For those of you in the future, who might be listening to this episode.

The first case, as far as I can tell, the first case of the disease, which is called COVID-19 associated with this novel coronavirus was discovered in China. I think the day before New Year's last year, December 31, 2019.

The first case in the US was January 20, 2020. Right now, worldwide, according to the website I'm looking at worlddominators.info. There are 212,799 known coronavirus cases that have been found, of course, in the world. And about 7,700 in the United States.

Of course, that's only things that we found. Literally, as I'm typing this, the story came up on my feed from the New York Times, saying that for every known case of the coronavirus, another 5 to 10 cases might be out there undetected.

So we're still in the exponential growth phase of this virus. It's growing very, very quickly. Here where I am in Los Angeles, a week ago, people were going to the gym, people were going to restaurants.

We knew there was an issue already colleges and schools have begun to close. People were trying to do a little bit of social distancing, but life was still almost normal.

Since then, all the restaurants have shut down, the gyms have shut down. People are trying to get food delivered. People are stocking up from the grocery stores. At least the grocery stores are still open as of Wednesday, March 18th.

But places like San Francisco, I have an even stoner set of rules that have been put down, sheltering in place, don't leave your house unless it's absolutely necessary.

And it's a weird situation because not everyone dies. There's different levels of fatality and injury associated with this. But you can get the virus, not dying yet, spread it to someone else who might actually pass away because of it.

So it absolutely makes super duper sense to take these social distancing and self-quarantining, self-isolating steps seriously.

So I have this wonderful conversation with Tara Smith, who is an epidemiologist. She's a professor at Kent State University.

To be honest, mostly studies bacterial infections, not viral infections like this is, but the idea of infections in pandemics and what to do about them that she's very much up on, and she's also a wonderful communicator about these things.

So it's a very clear, very clear-eyed and helpful, useful, practical set of comments that she offers. And also, we talk about the underlying science.

Because if you're a mindscape listener, you want to know what's the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection.

You want to know that there are some RNA-based viruses and DNA-based viruses and so forth. So here's where you're going to learn that.

Look, I hope everyone is staying safe out there, doing what you can. I hope that none of my listeners are out there partying with thousands of people just to show the virus whose boss, because that's not how it works.

There's little we can do in a practical way, maybe, when we're far apart to help each other. But it's important to maintain contact with other people.

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