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foundation is always the same. It starts with Intel. Learn more at Intel.com slash stories. Hey, this is Arielle. Still recording in my closet in New York City. Here in

New York State, the total number of coronavirus cases is doubling every three days.

And as of this recording, more than 20,000 people have died of the disease worldwide.

Given the scale of this pandemic,

it's easy to forget that this is actually

caused by something really small.

So the virus is basically a spiky ball.

Those spikes recognize and latch onto a protein called ACE2,

which is found on the surface of our cells.

And like a key fitting into a lock that is the first step to

launching an infection. Ed Young is a science writer for the Atlantic who often writes about

the microscopic world. the with just brought the barest scrap of genes has just brought the modern global order to its knees.

And that's kind of humbling, I think.

Ed says there's still a lot that we don't know about SARS-Covey too. That's the name of the coronavirus that we're up against. But scientists have started to make a rough sketch of the virus's biology. So today on the show, what do we know about how the virus works inside our bodies?

This is reset. And Ed Yang, there are a lot of viruses that we're familiar with and some of them we track regularly, like the flu.

What about for coronaviruses? Do we know a lot about them?

We very much do not. So flu is very familiar.

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