Valley Fever, Citizen Science Month Finale. April 24, 2020, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2020
⏱️ 48 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. This hour we'll talk about an illness called Valley Fever |
| 0:05.4 | that is caused by breathing in a soil fungus. We'll hear from patients and talk about the latest |
| 0:11.2 | treatments. But first, we learned this week that the first death from coronavirus in the U.S. |
| 0:17.0 | happened on February 6th. This is a big deal because before now, we thought the first death was |
| 0:23.6 | three weeks later on February 29th. So what does this changed coronavirus timeline mean? Here to talk |
| 0:30.8 | about that and other short stories in sciences. Annalie Newitz, journalist and author based in San Francisco. |
| 0:37.3 | Welcome back, Annalie. Hey, thanks for having based in San Francisco. Welcome back, Annalie. |
| 0:38.6 | Hey, thanks for having me. Let's jump right into this story about a shifted coronavirus timeline in the |
| 0:44.3 | U.S. There were two people who died before February 29th. Tell us about this. What's going on here? |
| 0:50.5 | So this new timeline starts in Santa Clara, California. That is a city kind of in the |
| 0:58.4 | Silicon Valley area. And what we know is that both of these deaths were originally chalked up to |
| 1:06.4 | some kind of influenza, but a medical examiner, an intrepid medical examiner, decided to send a couple |
| 1:13.7 | tissue samples off to the CDC. |
| 1:16.5 | And when we found out that indeed it was coronavirus, it completely changes our picture of how |
| 1:23.8 | the disease was spreading, because these two people do not appear to have any connection |
| 1:30.2 | to travelers, nor had they traveled. So it seems like these are examples of community spread. |
| 1:37.6 | And so it means the virus was around longer than we thought, right? |
| 1:41.6 | Much longer than we thought, potentially, and also spreading within the |
| 1:45.8 | community. So this is not something where, you know, people were coming in from outside. So that suggests |
| 1:51.3 | that, yeah, it had been spreading in Santa Clara County for quite a while. So why is it that we are just |
| 1:57.8 | finding out now that the people died of coronavirus before our first official |
| 2:03.1 | death? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Science Friday and WNYC Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Science Friday and WNYC Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

