Hi everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired, and my co-host,

my Kalori, is out this week. So I was thinking maybe I would just monologue for 45 minutes,

with some ad breaks, of course. No, I would not do that to you. I've actually invited our

excellent health and science writers, Megan Maltini and Adam, Adam, thank you for being here.

And of course, by here, I mean there at home.

Happy to be anywhere, but nice to see, nice to see your face on the, on the Zoom, as always.

Hello from my closet in Minneapolis. Glad to be here.

The reason why I wanted to bring Adam and Megan on the show this week is because we're

in a strange phase of the coronavirus pandemic right now. After months of quarantine, cities

and businesses are tentatively lifting restrictions and reopening around the world. But that, of course,

doesn't mean the coronavirus has just gone away. And while essential workers have been interacting

with people and exposing themselves to the virus for months now, for a lot of people,

these lifts on restrictions mean that going places and seeing people is possible again, but with a lot of caveats.

So people are starting to ask questions about how they should and shouldn't interact with other

people. This episode was actually inspired by one of our own wired colleagues who asked a

question in Slack about a complicated family situation. So since Megan and Adam are two of our resident

coronavirus experts, I've brought them on the show to help answer some of these questions.

And we went a little bit longer than usual this week, but that's because so many of you sent

in great questions. And honestly, there's no easy answer. All right. So the first batch of questions came to us through Wired's Instagram, and then later on in the show, I'm going to get to our staff questions.

And we're actually going to have some people calling in.

First question from Instagram, do I need to wear a mask all the time when I go out?

Here's the logic with the mask.

...