Just How Bad Is COVID-19? | Dr Eric Feigl-Ding | Modern Wisdom Podcast 149

So again, altogether this virus is ... it's, it's a mean little sucker. In certain ways, you know, SARS and MERS, which have much higher mortality, SARS at 10% mortality, MERS at like, um, 50 or 30%, and Ebola has 50%. A virus that kills more and kills faster is actually easier to control than a virus that kills slower, kills less, and spreads asymptomatically. So again, all these reasons why it's just so difficult. (whooshing sound)

Eric, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Pleasure to have you on. This must feel like a war zone for you at the moment.

Yeah, this epidemic, it's been raging. Um, I think the world woke up to it somewhere in late January, um, but it's, it's gotten really, really bad since. When we, just when we think it couldn't get worse, it's gotten worse. Um, like just yesterday, the total mortality, the total number of deaths outside of China actually exceeded the daily deaths inside of China. Like the curves have crossed, so now the epidemic is actually worse outside of China and it's not stopping.

(sighs) Well, I'm glad that I've got a hold of yourself so that you can try and, uh, give us some signal to cut through the noise that everyone has been seeing online. I recently saw Shane Parrish who's doing the same thing. He's got some coronavirus experts on. And, um, the most common question that people are asking is, is to do with trying to work out where the bullshit ends and the information begins, right? So, um, before we get started, who, who are you? Why, why should we listen to you?

Yeah, so I'm a public health scientist. I've been, uh, a faculty at Harvard for many years and, um, actually I resigned my faculty to run for Congress, but that's a different story. Um, but I, I, I really enjoy, uh, science communication and, you know, public policy and advocacy and especially raising alarm about this. My doctorate was in epidemiology, so the science of epidemics, and although I, I did other chronic disease epidemi, not, you know, infectious diseases epi, it's still in my wheelhouse. And I think sometimes in the world, you know, getting a message out there is something that many scientists are not good at. They know so much in their technical area that, that translating it for the world and making the masses listen, um, is something that's not usually taught and so it's something I really enjoy. And especially for this, um, pandemic now, I think waking people up and waking them up early before the tsunami hits is something we have to do in public health and we have to do way better. So this is why I'm tweeting nonstop about this COVID-19 and trying to make everyone listen.

I get it. Yeah, it's, um, it's interesting that some of the people that are the best qualified to tell us the technicalities and the specifics about what's happening perhaps aren't the best qualified to communicate that out, right? And that's, I, I, I get what you mean when you say about that. So, okay, let's start. What is coronavirus and what's COVID-19? Is that the same thing?