It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Tuesday, March 17.

With us now is Dr. James Hamblin, MD, a staff writer for the Atlantic and co-host of the Atlantic's new podcast,

Social Distance.

I wonder what that's about.

He's a doctor of preventive medicine.

He's a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health and author of a forthcoming book called Clean,

The New Science of Skin. Dr. Hamlin, thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Thank you for having me. And I wonder if you could start by reacting to the measures that have been

put in place in San Francisco today.

And it's really the whole San Francisco Bay Area, a number of counties around the city of San Francisco,

a region-wide shelter-in-place policy, as they're calling it.

I wonder if you have been looking at, since you have written so much and I guess are now

starting a podcast all about social distancing. If you've looked at what San Francisco is doing and if

you think it should be a model for cities like New York or the nation as a whole.

I think that it's obviously not a sustainable order for too long because you create

other, all kinds of other issues when you ask people to do that, but I think it's what's needed

right now.

And ideally we can be strategic about what cities are doing this and not simply have the

entire country shut down indefinitely all at the same time.

I think that creates a sense that what we're doing is not based in evidence and data.

And in part it isn't because we haven't had good testing up to this point, which could inform

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