Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 185 - Pandemic: COVID-19 vs 1918 Spanish Flu

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

What the Hell is going on right now? Why is the world in lockdown? Today I try and answer some biology basics: What is a virus? What is a coronavirus? Why is the governmental reaction to COVID-19 so m...uch more severe than it was to SARS back in 2003, or MERS in 2012, or the H1N1 outbreak of swine flu in 2009? I also interview Amy Ward, MS, RN, CIC, someone with a masters degree in infection prevention and epidemiology, to get a feel for what the medical community thinks of this pathogen. We break down how COVID-19 kills, what treatments are being explored, and I also go over a timeline of the 1918 Spanish flu to get a feel for how much worse that virus was and understand what we're trying to avoid with our current employment of "social distancing" and "shelter in place" measures. One of the most informative Sucks yet! Stay safe, and, this too shall pass. Hail Nimrod! World Health Organization COVID-19 information: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019Andrew Welmers Mental Health COTC FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/512302776280743/?ref=share Watch my Amazon special Don't Wake the Bear: https://amazon.com We've donated $4800 this month to The Martin Richard Foundation. Link to donate: https://teammr8.org/ Donate via Timesucker Matt Cox: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/mr8bos20/matthewcox12020 Toxic Thoughts Tour Is Currently On HOLD due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Listen to the best of my standup on Spotify! (for free!) https://spoti.fi/2Dyy41d Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vF9O50abfQ0Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Want to try out Discord!?! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 7500 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Big episode this week. So much info out there about COVID-19 and pandemics and social distancing and sheltering in place. I thought it'd be good to try and understand some basics and get a lot of info all in one place for you to consume. What is a virus? What is the coronavirus?
Starting point is 00:00:15 What is COVID-19? Why is the race for a vaccine important? What are antiviral drugs? How contagious is this new virus? How deadly? Why is the response to this virus so much more severe than it was to SARS in 2003 or to the H1N1 outbreak of 2009?
Starting point is 00:00:30 Why do articles about the Spanish flu of 1918 keep coming up? What the hell happened in 1918? Digging into all of that and so much more today here on TimeSuck, I interviewed a disease expert. You'll hear that. I did more research than I've ever done on any topic before. I've always tried to make time so I'm mostly about having fun, learning something interesting,
Starting point is 00:00:49 and I really hope I accomplished that goal today. Some episodes are silly, some are darkly fascinating, some are super weird, some are for sure. What the fuck was that? And some are important. I think today is one of those. So let's get into it. Let's give viral rapper meat sack mines
Starting point is 00:01:04 around the microscopic pathogen currently turning our whole world upside down today on a sheltered in place, lock down addition of time suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to time suck. You're listening to time suck. Happy Monday, suckers. This too shall pass. Say it with me. This too shall pass. Fuck you, COVID-19.
Starting point is 00:01:39 Say that with me. It feels good. Fuck you, COVID-19. Hail Nimrod. Help us, Lucifina. You you, COVID-19. Hail Nimrod, help us lose to Fina, you sexy sassy goddess. Sick of good boy, both jangles, and sing this shit away, triple M. I'm Dan Cummins, deep state puppet, propaganda promoter, Alex Jones, the spirit animal, J.K. gosh dang.
Starting point is 00:01:57 I'm not any of those. I'm the master sucker, constant hand washer, inconsistent foot washer, and you, you beautiful, curious bastard. You are listening to TimeSuck. Thank you for your continued ratings and reviews during this interesting time when I'm not allowed to tour, when listening patterns have been disrupted when chaos prevails in any parts of the world.
Starting point is 00:02:16 Your audio and video consumption is very much appreciated. Thanks to those of you who have used your recent downtime to check out the secret suck over 200 hours of extra content there. Thanks for checking out the scared to death podcast. Will over 30 hours there. Thanks for checking out my stand up, six albums on Pandora and Spotify, iTunes, Amazon and more. Two specials on Amazon Prime.
Starting point is 00:02:36 If you're a prime member, you can stream them for free. New special coming out on April 28th. Get out of here, devil. You can listen to that one over an hour of stand up recorded. Just outside of Detroit, devil. You can listen to that one over an hour of standup recorded that just outside of Detroit this past October. You can listen to it only on Pandora starting April 1st, April Fool's Day. So give it a listen. I'll be, you know, pushing out more information about it on Instagram and Facebook at Dan Cummins Comedy on both those platforms. Get some free laughs. And seriously, thank you for the support. Thank you for continuing to
Starting point is 00:03:03 support badmagicmerch.com during the instability of the current time, important announcement regarding our store, and then some virus learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a monopyle. The big Ohio based company we started using for the manufacturer and distribution and customer service has of course been affected by COVID-19. Order to shelter in place. April 7th is when Monopyle has been told they will be able to resume production and shipping. Possible they could open earlier. Kate and Logan and spicy club,
Starting point is 00:03:31 they're working with Monopyle closely to monitor the situation every day. Just because they're down doesn't mean you can't order new shit. You can still order as normal from the store, just expect of course a delay. Your support keeps the store and everything we're working on going. So we really do appreciate you ordering during this time. We appreciate your support more than ever
Starting point is 00:03:50 and to show that each order of $50 or more during this lockdown will receive a free special edition coronavirus-cousi and stickers when this is all over. So someday we can look back and hopefully laugh at a lot of this. Not all of it, I know, I know, but a lot of it. Thank you so much again for the support, bad magic productions, Logan and Kate say stay safe, y'all. Last thing about Merch, two new shirts in the store right now for time suckers, a time suck
Starting point is 00:04:14 supreme style shirt, simple stylish and classic and a dock holiday suck master mashup. I'll be your suckleberry tea. It seems fitting right now. Like Johnny Ringo. You look like someone just walked over you'll grave. Everyone here is arming up. I got a little more guns in the safe these days myself. If my neighborhood goes full red dawn, full Wolverines, I don't want to be defending my home with just my doodles. It's a penny and ginger.
Starting point is 00:04:39 They'll turn on me. They'll turn on the entire family. The second someone offers them bacon. I know that. I want to be doc holiday. Even if you don't want one of these shirts, check them out. Check them bacon. I know that. I want to be. Call it a. Even if you don't want one of these shirts, check them out. You know, just to see the artwork.
Starting point is 00:04:48 So fun. I love it. Love all the designs we have in the store. So proud of it at all. Thank you, Logan. And again, thank you all. And now let's get to learning. Got a lot of learning today to get to.
Starting point is 00:04:58 Let's try and have some fun with it. First, I'm going to go over our history with coronaviruses. Coronaviruses are not new. Talk a bit about where they've come from. Then we'll talk about why the response to this coronavirus is different than the response to past coronaviruses. Then we'll address what a virus even is. We'll look at how scientists are racing to come up with vaccinations and treatments for
Starting point is 00:05:23 COVID-19. We'll look at how it infects, how it kills. Then we'll jump into its timeline of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, a little bit of 19-20. So we can understand the devastating pandemic COVID-19 keeps getting compared to. After learning about the Spanish flu, you'll hear my interview with Amy Ward, MSRNCIC, someone with a master's in infection prevention and epidemiology, which I do not have.
Starting point is 00:05:47 We'll talk about what not to do in today's bleach drinking, COVID-its of the internet. Thank you a few listeners for suggesting the COVID-its there. And then we'll end with the havoc COVID-19 is already reaked in Italy. How it's been handled, you know,
Starting point is 00:06:02 or how it's affecting a lot of places in the world. Why we're all living in a new world of social distancing and shelter in place measures. I hope you learn a bunch today. I hope it helps. Hail, Nimrod. I want to start this off by clearing up a common misnomer. Why is this new disease that's fucking up our lives? Sometimes referred to as COVID-19, sometimes as a, as a coronavirus. A good analogy is the difference between the term dog and a specific breed of dog. While both jangles, our time suck man's got mascot character and badass deity of sorts is a dog that term doesn't describe what breed of dog bojangles is, bojangles is a pit bull.
Starting point is 00:06:37 All pit bulls are dogs, not all dogs are pit bulls. Dog is obviously a much less specific term that can be used to describe literally any other breed of dog Continuing with the dog breed analogy, COVID-19 is a new breed of dog and never before seen breed of dog You know kind of like a penny and gg my two Australian Labrador a little doodles, right? There are new breed penny pooper gingerbell similar to other Labrador Similar to other dogs, but not exactly the same. They're new. COVID-19 is a new breed of coronavirus.
Starting point is 00:07:09 And unlike in adorable, fluffy, Australian labordoodle, no one wants one, and everyone wishes it was dead. The concept of coronaviruses is not new. I don't know if you knew that. I did not know that. Coronaviruses refers to a group of viruses that have been known to cause respiratory issues for decades. Human coronavirus is first discovered in the 1960s. The earliest cases were infectious bronchitis viruses discovered first in chickens. And then in humans, coronavirus is are zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, oh my god, zoo on a z's, zoo on a on disease, these words, zo on disease.
Starting point is 00:07:46 I got my pronunciation guides, and they're still like, okay, yeah, coronavirus is our zo on disease. I'm trying to say that, right? Diseases that can start off in animals and then jump to humans. I'm not confident about the pronunciation. I am confident about the definition. There was coronavirus 229E, which affects humans and bats.
Starting point is 00:08:04 There was coronavirus OC43, which affects humans and bats. There was coronavirus OC43, which affects humans and cattle. They weren't very powerful or deadly strains. These early ones, viruses being associated with animals shouldn't come across as scary, by the way. It's not like all of a sudden viruses are mutating like never before and jumping from animals to humans and this is some new apocalyptic shit. Viruses have been starting off in one species of animal and slowly mutating to jump into
Starting point is 00:08:26 a different species since the beginnings of humanity. Most likely since before humans were around. Most of the coronavirus we've been dealing with for the past few decades haven't been that big of a deal. If the old coronavirus were high school basketball players, they'd be sitting on the JB bench and their parents would have stopped coming to games, you know, a few games into the season. They wouldn't have even, you know, yelled at the coach. They wouldn't have bothered.
Starting point is 00:08:48 They would have known that their kid sucked and didn't deserve to be out there on the court. It's actually thought that anywhere from 10 to 30, even some, and sometimes people say 40% of cold cases worldwide have been due to some strain of coronavirus for many years now. You know how people every year talk about feeling a bit off or how they probably have some little bug? I just gotta love touch something. Well, a lot of these little touches of something,
Starting point is 00:09:12 a lot of these little bugs for decades, at least, have been some kind of coronavirus. My wife Lindsey likes to tease me about this. You know, apparently I'm always saying that I have a touch of something. I don't think I've done the last few months because I got tired of being teased about it. I guess for a long time I was talking about
Starting point is 00:09:27 that has a little achy, not got a little stuff sinus, slight headache, stomach ache, et cetera. She thought I was whining. When the truth was, I've been fighting off coronavirus for years. Bachelors have been constantly harassing me and COVID-19 is just one in the long, long line
Starting point is 00:09:42 of pathogenic assholes. Some previous coronavirus strains have been a little more serious, like the SARS coronavirus that first showed up in 2002, had a lot of people scared in early 2003. SARS by the way stands for suck assy reindeer shit because you can only get about eating reindeer feces. Okay, that'll be the best virus ever. Wouldn't that be nice if you could only get like COVID-19 from like eating bird shit and then you could so easily look down on anyone who have it, you know, who wouldn't feel
Starting point is 00:10:10 sorry for him. He'd be like, wow, yeah, dummy. Shouldn't have eaten that shit. Starstands for a severe acute respiratory syndrome. There was a minor outbreak in Fushan, China. Over 8,000 infected, at least 774 died worldwide. That SARS-Virus started off in a bat, then jumped to Asian civet cats, what epidemiologists, people who studied the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases, term as
Starting point is 00:10:36 an intermediary animal. There are a variety of civet cats in Asia, also known as just civets. And I've jumped a lot in the past about making merch out of the genitalia of various animals. Well, civets actually have been harvested for the gel-like substance found in a pouch in their genital region, in their genital region, that's used to make perfume. It legal to traffic them for this purpose,
Starting point is 00:10:57 but that hasn't stopped a lot of people. They've also been sold for meat and local farmers market type traditional markets in China for many, many years. The civets got the virus from some horseshoe bats and then some humans got the virus from civets. Thoughts of the civet that gave the virus to humans first came from some undercooked meat sold in a Guangzhou market. The COVID-19 strain we're dealing with now, it was initially called SARS-2, is that close to SARS. Initially called SARS-2 by some, but then to avoid confusion with the first SARS strain,
Starting point is 00:11:28 it was renamed co-coronavirus, sorry, co-coronavirus, D disease 19, it was originally identified in 2019. So, you know, COVID-19, coronavirus disease 2019. We don't know for sure where this virus comes from, all those zero scientists think it was created in a secret lab by evil scientists to accomplish some kind of political agenda like thrown election one way or the other, so please don't think that. No scientists think that zero, not a, not fucking one legitimate scientist in the entire world. The medical and scientific community think that is ridiculous. So if you think that and you don't have a pathogen, centric scientific or medical degree,
Starting point is 00:12:08 overwhelming odds are that you're wrong. You're very, very wrong. Epidemiologists think just like SARS and MERS, talk about MERS in a second. MERS went from bats to camels and then to humans in the Middle East. This new virus also started off in bats and then went to, they think, a pangolin as an intermediary creature, the Chinese pangolin, a little badass, a little eight pound scaly ant eater. Looks like a little dinosaur.
Starting point is 00:12:32 There's a variety of pangolin species around the world. Many have recently gotten extinct. They're highly valued for their use in traditional Chinese medicine. It is illegal to harvest them for that purpose. It's illegal to harvest many of them for any reason at all. They're poached and trafficked a ton of the most trafficked mammal in the world, and they're a critically endangered species. This current pandemic might save their little scaly asses as it draws more attention
Starting point is 00:12:54 to the illegal poaching of them. People have been grinding up pangolin scales into a powder for years in China, sometimes precedent into a pill, using it to treat amongst other things, anxiety, hysterical crying in children, using it to try and cure deafness, helping with fever brought on by malaria, and it's thought to be useful in helping women who are possessed by either devils or ogres, not kidding. Women possessed by either devils or ogres, so you know, that's, that's just fucking awesome. Are you kidding me?
Starting point is 00:13:27 This whole COVID-19 pandemic could have actually started because some fucking witch doctor, medicine man, thought he needed some pangolin scale powder to get an actual ogre spirit thingy out of some local village woman's body. What the fuck? Education, education, education. The smarter our species becomes overall, the less dumb shit like this happens. Side note, if this is how it all actually started, I really hope it worked. I really hope that power got the ghost ogre out of that poor lady. I mean, that would really suck if this is all for nothing. That'd be epic, bummer. If thousands
Starting point is 00:14:01 and thousands die, you know, and then some village lady somewhere in rural China is like, Hey, what about this ghost? Tiger. Still got this goddamn ghost. Tiger and stuck inside me. The penguin powder didn't work. So what are we getting grand up next? What what new disease can we launch into another pandemic? What more back woods? Which doctrine can we cook up in 2020? The SARS virus started and all likelihood from eating, yeah, undercooked, civet meat, I said that. So the last two major coronavirus outbreaks have come from people, digging around with weird animals
Starting point is 00:14:33 are not supposed to be digging around with in China. Maybe that should stop. It actually might now. China has just made eating wild animals illegal. Hope that that can be enforced before we get some new batshit disease like tiger measles or seahorse syphilis or rhino aides, cobra pox, peacock measles. Who knows what else is out there? Hong Kong verologist, professor Dr. Leo Poon, great name, said recently, these animals have their own viruses. These viruses can jump from one species to another species,
Starting point is 00:15:03 then that species may become an amplifier, which increases the amount of virus substantially. When a large number of people visit markets, sell these animals each day, Poon says the risk of the virus jumping into humans increases sharply. Poon was one of the first scientists to decode these SARS-Coronavirus during the epidemic in 2003, and if Dr. Poon has any daughters, I hope he didn't name them sweet, you know, you get it? And if he has any sons, I hope he didn't name any of his sons, get that, you know, you get it. You know that I'm not mature enough
Starting point is 00:15:33 if you've listened to any of these episodes before to let a name like Poon slip by. Dr. Poon, there's my daughter sweet Poon, there's my son, get that Poon. So why is the global response to COVID-19 so much more intense than it was to SARS? Or even to other recent novel viral outbreaks like the H1N1 swine flu? Well, that's easy. Illuminati. Everything happening right now is part of the DeepStates plan
Starting point is 00:15:53 to put the shadow Zionist NWO government in place and kick off a dystopian version of the handmade tale Wake Up Cheaple! Under a Zai! May the Lord open, blessed be the fruit. Wake up, sheeple! Under his eye! May the Lord open, blessed be the fruit. Ah, no, that's not it. Although some of the edits of the internet seem to think that is the case. Of it, seriously, why with no worldwide government shutdowns
Starting point is 00:16:13 with no international travel bands, why didn't SARS go on to kill millions, right? We didn't react to that, like we're reacting to this. The answer reminds me of a game I used to play way too much on my phone a few years ago, a game called Play Incorporated. Pretty dark game, a super dark game. And I played it a ton for a while because I love dark shit. In this game, which looks real bad right now, you pick a pathogen and try to destroy the world. You pick a virus, bacteria, a prion, and you can adjust its level of vitality, its ability to spread in a variety of ways through the air, through blood, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:16:45 You know, you can be more transmissible through water, its detectability, et cetera. The goal is to kill off the entire world's population before the CDC and who wipe out your pathogen. And again, I know super fucked up. In this simulation, if you design a pathogen that is too lethal or shows symptoms too quickly, you lose the game. You lose because the hosts die before they can affect, infect enough other hosts to keep the disease going, or you lose because the pathogen shows symptoms too fast and then it's far easier to quarantine victims. SARS was actually more lethal than COVID-19.
Starting point is 00:17:21 More lethal than the Spanish flu. It showed more extreme symptoms much faster than COVID-19, so lethal than the Spanish flu showed more extreme symptoms much faster than COVID-19. So it was easier to respond to medically. The SARS virus had a mortality rate as high as 9.6%. The COVID-19 mortality rate seems to be closer to 1%. Possibly even lower, possibly a lot higher, but possibly lower. It's hard to say reports are varying. The World Health Organization's director general has spoken of it being at 3.4%, but that's based on known cases. And odds are there have been many, many, many mild cases
Starting point is 00:17:54 that were never tested. Here in Idaho, for example, it was recently almost impossible to get tested for the average person. So how can you find out the mortality rate of a disease when you have no idea how many people are actually infected? You can't. You can just make educated guesses. And for those guesses, it seems that SARS was a lot more deadly to those who caught it. But the SARS virus wasn't just also, wasn't as infectious in humans as COVID-19 appears to be. It didn't thrive as well in the human body. So much easier to contain and stop a
Starting point is 00:18:22 less infectious, less durable pathogen and keep it from reaching pandemic levels. Not all viruses like all breeds of dogs are created equal. Some breeds of dogs way cuter than others, not going to say which ones, even though doodles are the cutest, because people lose their fucking minds over dogs. Some strains of virus much more contagious than others, right? They're just constructed in a way that makes them theoretically much easier to spread into a huge pandemic.
Starting point is 00:18:48 The Merse coronavirus, aka the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, that virus of 2012 had a higher mortality rate than even SARS did. Way higher listed as high by some is 35%. That's incredibly high. That's way higher than the Spanish flu. But it wasn't very infectious. You know, it doesn't seem to be very infectious at all. So it's never become a major worldwide threat. It's hard to spread. It really does take the perfect storm of pathogen characteristics for a disease to truly become a pandemic, which is why it doesn't happen
Starting point is 00:19:19 very often, even though there's viruses around all the time, bacteria around all the time. Some medical professionals think that COVID-19 is the perfect storm of it, you know, ingredients. often, even though there's viruses around all the time, bacteria around all the time. Some medical professionals think that COVID-19 is the perfect storm of it, you know, ingredients. It seems to be very contagious. Uh, and it seems to be much more lethal than the average seasonal flu, which gets compared to a lot. The death rate of influenza in the U.S. is generally around 0.1%. So even if the death rate for COVID-19 is just 1%, that makes it 10 times as deadly.
Starting point is 00:19:45 If the death rate is say 3.4%, like the who director general has speculated 34 times as deadly. The CDC has said that the flu has killed 22,000 people in the US this flu season. If COVID-19 is 34 more times as lethal, then it would kill almost 750,000 people. Obviously, significantly more people. So now we know how COVID-19 is not just the same as coronavirus, right? Those two words are not interchangeable. And we know that it's not the same as the regular flu. More importantly, we know that we just don't know enough about it.
Starting point is 00:20:16 One more thing before we move on, why is COVID-19 called a novel virus? That one's easy to answer because it's new. We've never encountered this strain of virus before. It's a new novel virus. And because it's new, we have no vaccine and no immunity. So what even is a virus? Let's go over some virus 101 basics. I certainly needed a refresher in some biology basics.
Starting point is 00:20:37 I'm sure many of you could use one as well. And don't worry, I won't dwell on this too long if you find this shit boring. We touched on some of this stuff in the anti-vaccination movement suck episode 50 or 152. In layman's terms, a virus is a sneaky little no good piece of shit. It's an itsybitty asshole that loves to create
Starting point is 00:20:55 a lot of itsybitty asshole friends, a biological agent with a real Napoleon complex, a real desire to show how much, you know, how tough it is by kicking the shit out of often much bigger organisms. Now for the scientific explanation, a virus is an infectious agent that can only replicate within a host. Right? It needs to replicate within a host organism. It needs a host to multiply unlike its most common infectious disease peers, like bacteria or infectious fungus, like the one that causes ringworm or protozoa,
Starting point is 00:21:25 that causes a disease like malaria, bacteria and fungi and protozoa can multiply on their own and survive much longer outside a host than a bacteria. So what kind of host does a virus need? Well, some viruses replicate in animals, others replicate within plants, still others replicate in bacteria, huh? Some of those little assholes don't even play well
Starting point is 00:21:44 with other pathogens. They can be a parasite inside of another parasite. A plant virus cannot jump and infect an animal, but an animal virus, as we've already went over, can't and often does jump from one species to another. They can mutate, which sounds scarier than it is. Human cells like viruses also mutate. As do any other organism cells, mutation just a part of life, part of evolution.
Starting point is 00:22:05 Animal and plant cells have mechanisms, though, to fix mutations and viruses don't. They're very simple entities. If a virus was a car, it would be the base model. It would have no fancy features. It would manually roll down the windows. Most virus mutations hurt the virus instead of help it. And the mutation dies out due to natural selection. Some mutations can make a virus more dangerous, but that's very, very rare. And even if that does happen, the mutation is still generally genetically similar enough to its predecessor that one vaccine would work for both the original and for the mutation. So, don't worry. That's a second we find a vaccine for COVID-19.
Starting point is 00:22:40 It's just going to mutate and beat the vaccine, and we're going to be back to square one. That's highly improbable. Also, yeah, COVID-19 does not appear to be some super powerful disease. Humanity has faced much worse pathogens than this one in the past and survived. We'll survive this. I mean, not all of us, but that is the case with every single new disease. That's the case with every new season of the flu. Always has been and always will.
Starting point is 00:23:03 The black plague, It's not that The black plague way worse than this This is just the worst little pathogen. We've had to deal with since the Spanish flu aka the 1918 flu pandemic You know, so it's just been a long time. So we've since we face something this strong The thought that COVID-19 is some constantly mutating super virus is just based in paranoia and Hollywood more than it is in science. It's not a mass extinction type event But it is nasty just like all viruses are nasty to some degree the very word virus comes from the Latin virus that means a poisonous slimy liquid Right nasty definition for a nasty little organism viruses in addition to being nasty are also teeny tiny
Starting point is 00:23:43 Tiny little microscopic parasites generally much much smaller than other common bringers of pain like bacteria the measles virus for examples about eight times smaller than the E. coli bacteria the hepatitis virus about 40 times smaller than E. coli to really understand how smaller viruses the polio virus is about 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt, that a single grain of salt. They're so small that while various biologists theorize that they existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, no one actually had seen a virus until 1931, when powerful electron microscopes were developed. Fameamed scientists, Lewis Pasture, had theorized that it existed in the late 19th century when he couldn't locate the cause of rabies and speculated it must be caused by a biological
Starting point is 00:24:31 agent too small to be detected by microscopes. More scientists came to the conclusion that a tiny pathogen existed that was technologically unable to be seen, you know, at the time, they couldn't detect it with existing equipment, but they did think it was the root of other diseases like foot and mouth disease and these brainiacs would be right. Amazing to be that smart. To scientifically be certain that something exists that you can't see here, touch, you know, smell, you know, you just can't, you just able to theorize that it exists.
Starting point is 00:25:00 Pretty crazy that a few decades before laying eyes on these things. By 1900, they had defined viruses in terms of infectivity and the requirement for living hosts to replicate. All these years later, exactly what these things are is still a bit of a mystery. Their strange little entities, opinions differ as to whether viruses are a form of life or some type of organism on the edge of life, but not alive like other organisms. They have genes, but they don't have a cellular structure like other life forms. They're really their own thing. They exist in their own animal ish kingdom. They don't have their own metabolism. The chemical processes that occur within an
Starting point is 00:25:36 organism to maintain life, processes that help define animals and plants as being alive. They can't reproduce on their own. Another typical hallmark of a living creature, they need again host cells to replicate, so what the fuck are they? Essentially, they're harmful little machines. Hard to destroy, partially because they're so simple. Hard to kill because they're not exactly alive. They're like the zombies of the pathogen world or the walkers of the disease world. There's not much to them, just nucleic
Starting point is 00:26:05 acids, either DNA or RNA and proteins. And that's it. Nucleic acids are any of a group of long, linear macro molecules that carry genetic info, directing our cellular functions, a little simple double helix brain of sorts. And actually, with the viruses, not even always a double helix, just a part of that program to seek out a host. Use the host cellular tissue to replicate. They seek a new host and replicate again, right? That's basically all the virus wants to do.
Starting point is 00:26:33 Is all it's program to do is just to seek hosts, replicate, seek, host, replicate, rinse, wash, repeat. You know, when viruses invade cells to replicate, they don't always replicate right away. Sometimes it is chill. Sometimes they just chill. Sometimes they kick back and take a little virus nap. Sometimes they can lay dormant for a long period of time. And then cause a non-lethal event, say like a cold sore. And then they try to spread themselves
Starting point is 00:26:55 to a new host via that cold sore, think of the herpes virus, not always lethal, sometimes just annoying. Other times they destroy cell tissue in a way that can lead to illness and sometimes to the death of the host organism. When a virus spreads, it becomes a virion to do so. It builds itself a little protein, little shield, little outer barrier that allows it to stay alive, it moves from cell to cell or from host to host. How does a virus move from host
Starting point is 00:27:22 to host? A variety of ways depends on the virus. Different viruses find different portals of entry. You may have seen that term in some recent articles. The Herpes virus is spread through direct skin to skin contact, looking for a break in the skin, looking for thinner skin like the skin on your lips or genital tissue. Most viruses can be spread through blood, coronavirus is spread mostly through coughing and sneezing. It puts a little droplets of saliva and mucus into the air and inside of those droplets are dirty, little no good rat-fucked viruses.
Starting point is 00:27:50 These viruses may land on a surface, lived there from anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Someone else could touch them and touch a soft tissue access point like their eye or mouth or rectum and now the virus is inside their body. And that is how COVID-19 spreads. And that is why I've made some changes in my life. I stopped sticking fingers in my ass all the time once this whole coronavirus situation broke out.
Starting point is 00:28:11 Like I never talked about it before, but I used to stick my fingers on my ass. I mean, really just kind of constantly. You know, I would shake somebody's hand, I'd cover my nose when I'd sneeze, you know, I'd touch the door handle or you know, I'd touch a pastry counter, and then just right back up my ass.
Starting point is 00:28:25 It was usually right before that, my fingers were my ass and right after that. I'd stick them in there. I'd put my wallet back in, my pocket, and then just right back in my butt. I used to call my special back pocket, but not now. Sometimes I put things in there. Sometimes I put my wallet in there, put loose change, put an odd snack, change of clothes in there, not now,, put an odd snack, change of clothes in there, not now, now with the current situation.
Starting point is 00:28:47 And I hope you know I'm joking. I hope you know that was ridiculous. Now, not joking. This is why we've been washing our hands more lately. It's currently thoughts that the COVID-19 virus can live for around three hours in the air. Right, and that's generally how it can spread. That's why you don't want somebody to sneeze on you,
Starting point is 00:29:02 that's somebody to talk too close. You know, they're just push pushing little particles into the air, and then those little particles can go into your mouth, get down into your upper respiratory tract. They can live on services such as steel for up to three days. They can live roughly 24 hours they think on services like cardboard, it varies from service to service. They don't think it can live longer than three days on any service. If you touch one of those virus-covered services, and you don't have an open wound, the virus can stick into,
Starting point is 00:29:27 your skin will protect you from the virus. That's the first line of defense. But then, with your skin, you touch your eye, nasal cavity, mouth, vagina, butthole, et cetera, then you can push that little virus right inside of your body. Unless you destroy your damage to the virus with hand sanitizer, it's at least 60% alcohol. Viruses don't like alcohol,
Starting point is 00:29:44 or wash with antibacterial soap that also kills viruses by creating an abundance of tiny little soap bubbles that stick to viruses and erode their outer shield and expose their little virus stupid fucking guts, and then they die as much as the thing that's not alive can die. Unless you do that, you can transport the virus
Starting point is 00:30:01 into a place where you are vulnerable. As far as masks go, do painters masks or basic surgical masks protect you from COVID-19? No, they don't. Virus is too small. You can sneak past those little filters pretty easily. So fucking tiny. A more specialized mask known as an N95 respirator can protect you from airborne COVID-19 viruses. But unless you're out there on the front lines,
Starting point is 00:30:25 unless you're a doctor or nurse or medical volunteer, if you're hearing this podcast, soon after it comes out, please don't try and buy those. There's a shortage, medical staff need them. Target recently apologized a few days ago for having them on store shelves in Seattle and Seattle medical staff didn't even have them in hospitals, not for everybody.
Starting point is 00:30:42 Okay, now let's build on what we just learned to talk about what this COVID virus does COVID-19 once it gets inside of you. How does it spread, you know, from human to human? Once it gets in, let's add a tiny little barely audible scream only recently heard by the latest incredibly sensitive microscopic microphones. Once it gets in, it admits a tiny little fuck yeah bro. Fuck yeah. If you like, if youer. If your ears are strong enough, you can hear like a little fucker. We're in. No. Once inside, it finds host, that'd be pretty awesome though.
Starting point is 00:31:13 I mean, I know it's shitty, it's a disease. But it's pretty awesome. It's like, check out this new audio recording, these viruses. And they're like, come on guys, look at it there. And then you see somebody just, you know, you just kind of clear the toilet. Fuck yeah, we're in. What did we do? We fucking did it.
Starting point is 00:31:28 Once you get some side to find host cells, which cells that finds depends on the virus, HIV virus, goes after CD4 or helper T cells, cells that help regulators suppress immune system response, more on T cells in a bit. The COVID-19 virus attacks cells in our airways. It loves our upper respiratory tract. It loves cells that produce a protein called ACE2, ACE2.
Starting point is 00:31:51 Humans have hundreds, or sorry, humans have hundreds. Humans have billions of cells in our airway alone. That's a slight difference between hundreds and billions. We have about 100 trillion cells total in our meat sack bodies. And when the COVID-19 virus gets into one of its preferred upper respiratory track cells, like any other virus, it starts fucking itself. It fucks itself so hard, kind of does actually. It uses cellular tissue to start to self-replicate, big time.
Starting point is 00:32:16 It can create millions of copies of itself, millions of other little viruses that shoot out from the host cell after an incubation period. And it can do that multiple cycles eventually destroying the host cell. How long does it take to do this? Vibal replication can depend on the virus, take anywhere from one to two days to a decade. The HIV virus that attacks, that causes AIDS, HIV actually standing for human, immunodeficiency virus, takes from one to 10 years. The flu, they think like, you know,
Starting point is 00:32:46 are the flu, a seasonal flu, one to two days. It's thought that the COVID-19 is a fast, flu-like viral incubation period. Being that it's so new again, still being studied. But the thing you just, you know, day or two, just kicking out new viruses. Early studies show that roughly 95% of those who get COVID-19 show symptoms within five days,
Starting point is 00:33:02 over 99% thought to show symptoms in the first 14 days. It's moving quick. Now, even if we have a hundred trillion cells, how do these viruses create in millions of other viruses each time they infect a new cell, not kill us after like two incubation cycles? I mean, if one virus created a million viruses, and then each of those viruses
Starting point is 00:33:22 also created a million viruses, that right there is a trillion viruses. Enough to infect every single cell in the human body after just two incubation cycles. But that doesn't happen thanks to our immune system. T cells, thank fucking Nimrod for T cells. A healthy human with a properly function immune system has 25 million to a billion T cells in their body.
Starting point is 00:33:43 T cells are like your body's own personal military your own legion of Chestie pullers and colonel Robert L. Howard's T-cells are a type of white blood cell made in bone marrow like all red and white blood cells red blood cells move oxygen Around the body white blood cells help fight infection white T-cells mature in the thymus just above your heart about the size of a deck of cards and White blood cells can be distributed through the body via either blood vessels or through the lymphatic system. And the lymphatic system uses the movements of your body to push lymph fluid around. Unlike blood vessels, you know,
Starting point is 00:34:16 that where blood gets pushed around by the beating of our hearts. So another good reason to be active right now in exercise, keep that lymph fluid moving around. And every time I say lymph fluid, for some reason my brain goes to the lymph biscuit and then I hear break stuff lyrics. And if my day keeps going this way, I just might break your fucking face tonight. Why? Why?
Starting point is 00:34:36 What's wrong with me? When a virus attacks, T cells move from the lymph system to the blood vessels via lymph nodes located throughout your body. That's one reason when you get sick while your lymph nodes often feel swollen. Your body is sending out troops to fight innovation. Those lymph nodes are mobilizing an internal army to fuck up those viruses. There are two basic types of T cells, killer T cells, and helper T cells. Killer cells seeking destroy infected cells that have been turned into virus factories and
Starting point is 00:35:04 shut down production. Pretty bad ass. A vast army of lethal T cells seeking out infected cells with a help of antigens and Jectin a toxin into the infected cell, killing the cell, all the viruses inside. Fuck you, COVID-19. Helper T cells, they're like cheerleaders. They watch the killer T cells and they're like, good job, you're doing great. Get him.
Starting point is 00:35:23 Get at me guys. Come on. Oh, awesome job, you're doing great. Get him, get him, guys, come on. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Oh, no, that'd be so weird. That's all he did, just like cheer on. No, they're battle coordinators. They tell the killer cells to replicate
Starting point is 00:35:36 so they can make more themselves and keep fighting. They monitor the internal battlefield, make sure reinforcements are common, make sure reinforcements are called off, the battle is won, they're kind of like, make sure reinforcements are called off, the battle is won. They're kind of like, not quite, but kind of like if you've ever watched a crew race, competitive rowing, Gonzaga's crew team, I only reference point, but I have eight rowers in the boat, and then one cox-wayne, telling the rowers to keep rowing, setting the pace, sometimes
Starting point is 00:35:57 steering with a killer, you know, coordinating the movement of the boat. If killer T-sales are the rowers, the helper T-cells will be the cockswing. Just kill, kill, kill. Come on killers, keep moving. Kill, kill, find those cells, come on. More reinforcements coming. And our bodies are so magical, usually these T-cells shut down viral replication before the virus destroys
Starting point is 00:36:18 enough of our cells to really hurt us or to kill us. And some of these T-cells, they can remember what it took to fight this virus. Right at first, they're figuring out like, well, fuck is this new guy? You know, they're, they're gonna be a South Pole. You're riding, you're gonna punch him. And then towards the, you know, the end of it, they're like, ah, okay, he never guards the body. He never guards the body. Just fucking body shots all day long. And then the next time the virus comes, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're immune because now they're right away.
Starting point is 00:36:42 They're like, I remember this dude, you just fucking punch him in the kidney. He's going down, he's going down right quick. He never guards it. And these cells, they live in the body for a long time these little memory cells. Right, the T cells can turn into memory cells. Even after all the viruses from the first infection have been destroyed, they stick around, they stay ready,
Starting point is 00:36:58 you know, ready to quickly recognize and attack a returning virus. You know, making lots of antibodies, so they can stop the infection in this tracks. The first time your body fights a virus, let's say it takes 15 days to get rid of it, with the help of memory cells, second time your body sees the same virus, you might knock that shit out like a day and a half,
Starting point is 00:37:15 with the help of memory cells, right? You get rid of the virus before you even feel sick. That's gaining immunity. And there's more to it than I just laid out. There's B cells, antibodies produced by B cells, other immunity details. I don't want to bog things down with. Our bodies are very complex, so complex. There is a reason you don't get to take a weekend online course to become a doctor or nurse
Starting point is 00:37:35 practitioner or epidemiologist. Little more about immunity. Another way to gain immunity is to be vaccinated with dead viruses or weakened viruses that kick off the same response in your body's immune system that a fully functional virus would kick off, right? Make it easy on your body. Throw in these little dead viruses or very weakened forms of the virus. You know, they're just like, I can't.
Starting point is 00:37:55 I don't want to fight. And then T-cells like, fuck you! Pum-pum-pum-pum! Just start smacking them. You know, they don't care that they're half dead already or, you know, they're just punching a corpse, I guess. They're already dead. And it still stimulates the same memory cells gets them prepared to fight the real virus They've ever if it or shows up later
Starting point is 00:38:11 Can you get sick from a vaccination? Yeah, you can't have a rare allergic type reaction You could get a very weak informed the disease you're being vaccinated against is your body fights dead or damaged viruses And you could get like a low grade fever aches headache fatigue, etc dead or damaged viruses and you could get like a low grade fever, aches, headache, fatigue, etc. You can feel off or bad because your body is putting its energy into attacking that little weakened invader. And full transparency, the vaccination might not work. Seasonal flu vaccinations aren't even close to 100% effective.
Starting point is 00:38:38 They vary year to year, sometimes only around 40% effective, but 40% way better than 0%. I don't have a PhD in mathematics, but I'm 100% positive that 40% way better than 0%. I don't have a PhD in mathematics, but I'm 100% positive that 40% is better than 0%. Math, the more you know. Many of the world scientists are race to discover a COVID-19 vaccination right now and we will get it in time. Two weeks ago at the University of Nebraska,
Starting point is 00:39:00 early patients who were aboard a cruise ship where people got infected, the diamond princess, volunteered for vaccination trials. The vaccines developer, Mederna, therapeutic, say testing will take at least a year to complete. Other companies are also running preliminary trials. Some researchers think maybe a COVID-19 vaccine can be ready for mass consumption as early as this fall. That's a very rare minority of researchers that think that most think it will take at least a year. Virtually no one thinks it will take longer than 18 months. So I guess that's, I don't know, kind of good.
Starting point is 00:39:34 I mean, obviously 12 to 18 months, you know, the most realistic estimate, that's going to fucking suck. Hopefully, someone can create a vaccine faster than that. But, yeah, well, a lot to wait and see. Wonder how many anti-vaxxers are going to get the vaccine when it does come out? You know, I can just picture some anti-vaxxers. I'd be like, you know, I wanna get this one.
Starting point is 00:39:52 This one seems real. Then I'm gonna go back to post it on Facebook about how bad and fake and useless vaccines are. In addition to vaccines for those not infected, the World Health Organization, who, many other health organizations, are racing to come up with an effective anti-viral treatment against a disease.
Starting point is 00:40:09 I didn't know shit about antiviral treatments before this week. Think of HIV AIDS again when you think of antivirals. That virus was first identified in 1984. We still don't have a vaccine for reasons that we would require an entire suck on HIV to properly explain. It's a very unique type of virus.
Starting point is 00:40:23 It's very sneaky and hides, and it takes a long time to trigger antibodies and blah, blah, but despite no vaccine, treatment of HIV and developed nations has progressed to the point that the disease is no longer a desense. Thanks specifically to antiviral medications. Antiviral medications have lowered the amount of the virus in certain people's bodies to a level that is undetectable. Think of magic Johnson, Hall of Fame basketball player, one of the best to ever put on a uniform, one of the greatest lakers, if not the greatest laker of all time, by him and
Starting point is 00:40:54 Kobe and Karim, magic with Diak knows with HIV in 1991, almost 30 years ago. He's 60 years old and he's had the disease most of his adult life, and he's very healthy. Doctors currently think that due to the drug cocktail of antiviral medication, he is taking, he could easily live until at least the age of 160. Did you see that video of him taken last year when he was 59 years old, when he was playing one-on-one with LeBron James, and he beat LeBron two out of three games dunked on LeBron at the age of 59 multiple times dunked from the foul line in that game. And if you've seen that video, send me the link because I don't remember it ever existing. I just made it up and that'll be fucking incredible to find out that happened.
Starting point is 00:41:39 No magic is not immortal. He's not a highlander, but he is arguably healthier in the vast majority of all six year olds, despite having HIV for just under three decades. And he's super healthy because of anti-retroviral therapy known as art. Art drugs prevent HIV from replicating, and that obviously reduces the amount of HIV in the body, the viral load, which means your body can deal with it. Keep the viral load small enough and it's truly as if you don't have it. Just like when you first get an infection,
Starting point is 00:42:09 a virus infection, you don't feel it. It's because the viral load is so small, it's not doing enough damage to register. That's what these drugs do. They keep it at that level. I mean, you have to keep taking the drugs or the virus will start to replicate again and then you're fucked and it's gonna shut down
Starting point is 00:42:21 your immune system and medicine doesn't kill the virus. It just freezes its reproductive cycle. Sadly, after its replication process is frozen, viruses don't starve to death and die, because again, they're not really alive, they don't eat, they don't breathe, they're simple and hard to kill, because they don't fucking do much.
Starting point is 00:42:36 They don't share the weaknesses of other organisms that are truly alive, they're little demons. Similar to HIV's art, scientists, in addition to looking for a vaccine, also looking to figure out a drug or drug cocktail that could keep the COVID-19 virus from replicating inside the body. Freeze that viral load, give the T.T. cells a better chance to like fucking work the body
Starting point is 00:42:56 before it messes you up. One of the most promising drugs to help those with COVID-19 is REM. Take me a second, the first time I see these words, REM, desiveer. There we go. Remdesiveer. Remdesiveer. Remdesiveer was originally developed to combat Ebola and related viruses. Remdesiveer shuts down viral replication by inhibiting the key viral enzyme, the RNA dependent
Starting point is 00:43:17 RNA, uh, Paula, Paula may risk God damn it. Paula, Paula, Marace, Paula, Marace.ais. The drug does not work on the Ebola virus, but it did show in test tube and animal studies that it could inhibit the coronavirus, that caused SARS and MERS, so fingers crossed, you know, it works on COVID-19. The first COVID-19 patient discovered or did diagnosed in the US, a young man in Snow Homage County in Washington was given Remdesivir when his condition worsened and he improves the next day. According to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, a Californian patient who received Remdesivir, who Dr. Sott might not survive recovered as well.
Starting point is 00:43:59 So why isn't using this miracle drug, you know, or why isn't, I'm sorry, everyone using this miracle drug, you know, or why isn't, I'm sorry, everyone, using this miracle drug right now. Well, because it's very risky, because you can only use it if you're willing to risk your eyesight. Remdesivir has to be injected into your eyeballs in order to set off the right chemical reaction side of you. And you need a big dose.
Starting point is 00:44:19 You need at least 200 milliliters. Canisota has 12 ounces of fluid in it. You need almost seven ounces over half a can shot through a long, very thick needle over 15 inches long into your eyeball. That needle has to be jammed almost four inches into your eye, right, really into your head through your eye. And that's why I almost know and want this treatment. And that was also not true.
Starting point is 00:44:44 Sorry. It's hard to make this shit interesting or funny. I gotta find, I gotta find some lies here and there. But seriously, why isn't everyone using this miracle drug right now? Well, for starters, in order for this medicine that keeps you alive by stopping a virus from replicating to the point that your body's immune system is, you know, not so overwhelmed that you die,
Starting point is 00:45:02 well, first you need to catch the virus. You have to catch the virus early. And it's hard to do that with COVID-19 because there's a tragic shortage of tests for starters. Also, the virus moves fast. It can take several days for test results to come back. Well, it could. All this information has changed so fast. Now they've come up with tests that are much quicker. So hopefully if they can get enough of those out to people, right, this would make this medicine, give it better chances of working, but the drug is super expensive. So that makes it, you know, a little bit cost prohibitive right now. And also, you have to have it administered intravenously. And we don't have enough medical staff and hospital beds to give it to everyone. This feels like
Starting point is 00:45:41 a treatment that can work once things calm down, then it'll be more effective, more, you know, realistic to kind of use it, using it in mass right now, right during this stage, you know, not really going to be effective on a broad scale. Another option currently being explored is the two-fold anti-malarial drug, Alon Musk and President Trump and others have talked about recently. It's a Clarkwin and Hydroxychloroquine. This drug combo is shown promising results with some viruses in the past. However, it's made things worse with others. Results from COVID-19 patients being treated with it as somewhere in China, murky at best. These drugs, if they work, could stop the virus from invading cells and again, be able to replicate.
Starting point is 00:46:21 The who also looking at the combo of retone of ear and lopene of ear. This combination drug sold under the brand name Calatra or Kiltra was approved in the US in 2000 to treat HIV infections. The first trial with COVID-19 not encouraging sadly. Doctors in Wuhan, China gave 199 patients two pills of lopene of her and a redone of her twice a day plus plus standard care, versus standard care alone, no significant difference between the two groups.
Starting point is 00:46:51 And there were other drugs and drug combinations being looked at, all kinds of shit being thrown against the wall. Nothing looks amazing again because these viruses are little motherfuckers that's throwing Z-packs again, you know, try trying and, you know, all kinds of combinations, but these weird little robots built only to replicate and destroy are just hard to, to, I can treat medically. Like unlike bacteria, you can't kill them with antibiotics. Bacteria you don't hide inside cells like viruses do.
Starting point is 00:47:15 Certain antibiotics can kill bacteria so they can't harm cells, but there is no direct equivalent with viruses. So where do these little viruses even come from anyway? Like why do these tiny pieces of shit even exist? Well, Ed Rabicki, a virologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa says that tracing the origins of viruses is difficult because they don't leave fossils.
Starting point is 00:47:36 It makes sense. Some viruses even have the ability to switch their own genes into those of the cells they infect which being studied in their ancestry requires untangling it from the history of their hosts and other organisms. What makes the process even more complicated is that viruses don't just infect humans. They can infect basically any organism from bacteria to horses, seaweed to people. The fact that many viruses like Ebola and COVID-19 are only found in a limited number of
Starting point is 00:48:00 species suggests that they are truly or novel, truly new, and many of these new viruses likely originated in insects, many millions, many million years ago, and at some point in evolution developed the ability to infect other species, probably as insects interacted with or fed from them. And that's about all we know. We don't know why the fuck these things exist or where they come from, just like religious beliefs aside, we don't know why we exist. So now let's talk about one of the reasons it's so important to come up with a vaccine or a treatment for COVID-19.
Starting point is 00:48:31 I mean, for starters, it can kill you. I mean, you will most likely survive for sure based on its low mortality rate, but it, you know, it does kill and it can kill you. How? As I said a while back to COVID-19 virus attacks cells in our airways. These viruses have tiny little spikes on their outer protein shield floating around in their little Vary on form is little spikes made of protein and not the cool muscle kind not the ripped abs keto kind Not the kind that may you know make you harder wet viruses don't have sexy muscles a little robot fox don't have any muscles
Starting point is 00:49:01 But they do have spikes of course they doikes have long been associated with being evil. Most depictions of the devil show them having horns and these little bastards have spikes, make sense. These protein spikes are the key to the virus's ability to invade the cells in your respiratory tract. They help the virus find, and then stick to AC or ACE2, now protein on the surface of some of your cells, and that allows the virus to get inside, use their spikes to stick to lock onto these cells
Starting point is 00:49:27 The virus tricks our cells and helping it get inside They're all like hey, what's up? What's up throat cell? Hey, I'm just you know, I'm a thing that comes by sometimes. I'm I'm Hank. I'm Hank from the cellular IRS. Yeah I'm a cellular IRS agent named Hank, and everyone likes Hank. Hank's friendly, and today Hank needs to do a cellular audit. Make sure that you're working properly. Dot in your eyes, cross in your teeth, can I come in? That's great, thanks, thanks, Cell.
Starting point is 00:49:54 Thanks for letting me in. You stupid fuck, I'm not Hank, I'm Cyrus the virus. I'm gonna use you to make more of me until you're dead. Yes, Cyrus the virus uses an enzyme that is present in your cells to break the protein spikes in half, allowing the spike to then guide the virus inside the cell. Cyrus gets in there, gets to replicate them pretty soon. There's tons of these little pieces of Cyrus shit
Starting point is 00:50:14 in your respiratory tract. Your T cells start to fight. As the battle is waged, numerous cells are destroyed. You may start to feel fever, fatigue, sore throat, nasal congestion, a dry cough, difficulty breathing, why? Well the sore throat is caused by a viral tissue damage in the throat, inflammation due to the body's response to the virus.
Starting point is 00:50:33 And as nasal and sinus congestion leads to drainage down the throat, which can trigger a cough due to mucus irritating tissue in your throat, and also your body is using the cough to expel mucus dead cells, et cetera, out of your body. Mucuses made by your body every day, by the way, one to 1.5 liters of it. Usually you swallow it. Don't even notice when you're healthy, it's clear in watery. Mucuses are a normal slippery and stringy fluid substance produced by many lining tissues. And mucus glands in the body acts as a protective and moisturizing layer to keep critical organs
Starting point is 00:51:02 from drying out. Mucus also acts as a trap for irritants like dust, smoke, pathogens, viruses. Mucous contains antibodies, enzymes to help fight off infections. You should like mucous. You should love it. It gets a bad rap. It's called snot. It gets dried out call.
Starting point is 00:51:16 It gets called boogers. It needs a new publicist. Mucous is not a problem. It's part of your body's solution to a problem. When you get sick, mucous can darken and thicken. There's millions and millions of destroyed viruses and millions of dead white blood cells and tissue destroyed by the infection. It's caught up in it. Infection of blood, get mixed in, dark bloody, dry mucus. That's something you don't want. That's a sign that currently
Starting point is 00:51:36 your infection is kicking the shit out of you. Right? That gets, you know, sliding down your throat. That makes your throat even more irritated. Now let's talk about fevers, fevers like mucus, commonly misunderstood. They aren't the problem, like mucus, they're part of the solution. Fevers are caused by chemicals called pyrogens, flown in the bloodstream. Pyrogens make their way to the hypothalamus in the brain, which regulates the temperature of your body. When pyrogens bind to certain receptors in the hypothalamus due to infection, your body temperature rises. They're sound in the alarmalamus due to infection, your body temperature rises.
Starting point is 00:52:05 They're sound in the alarm. Heat shit up! More heat! We need more heat to kick this infection right in the dick! Heat can trigger T-cells, start producing heat shock proteins, which protect cells against stress, help some survive being attacked. That heat your body is producing to try to keep you alive. Many viruses are temperature sensitive, an increase in heat could theoretically hinder or help destroy them, an increase in heat. Dude inflammation allows T cells to move faster through your bloodstream, it's speeding up your whole system.
Starting point is 00:52:34 It can allow them to fight and destroy more virus-laden cells. I'm sure you've seen in movies, when people, try to put cool rags on people's heads hoping to break the fever, most doctors seem to think that you should not outside of very extreme cases try and break a fever. The fever 99% of the time will break when your body has turned the tide against the infection.
Starting point is 00:52:52 It's wage war against. He does good. Mostly a high fight fever, very high will put stress in your body. Your heart beats faster. You consume oxygen more quickly. Your cells consume more energy than usual. Very high temperatures above 105 degrees can start to directly damage cells. But again, not really the fever hurting you.
Starting point is 00:53:11 It's the war inside of you that's hurting you. Your body will risk hurting you with the fever if it feels like that fever is the only way to stop the intruder from killing you. People use the thing that fever's killed you because prior to understanding the tiny pathogens killed you, the fever's what people would see. Now doctors know that a fever is a symptom People use the thing that fevers killed you because prior to understanding the tiny pathogens killed you the fevers
Starting point is 00:53:25 What you know people would see now doctors know that a fever is a symptom of something else going on that needs to be treated Don't treat the fever try to treat what's causing someone's immune system to try and shut, uh, you know down the fever Back to the sore throat for a second. I got distracted, you know by a snot earlier didn't finish explain why COVID-19 makes your throat sore by a snot earlier, didn't finish explaining why COVID-19 makes your throat sore. The virus is attacking cells in the area of your throat. The tissue gets inflamed due to T cell response. Inflammation creates pain and fatigue as your body's immune system rallies to fight this virus
Starting point is 00:53:54 destroying your cells. If your immune system with or without the help of drugs doesn't fight COVID-19 off quickly, the virus can travel further down your bronchial tru- yeah, tubes, and that's why you can have trouble breathing. The bronchial tubes your bronchial tru- true, yeah, tubes. And that's why you can have trouble breathing. The bronchial tubes or bronchial tree are the set of pipes that carry the air that you breathe in and out of your lungs. The, you know, it allows you to sing stuff like a keep forgetting. I'm not in love anymore. I keep forgetting things will never be the same again. I keep forgetting, I mean, that song
Starting point is 00:54:26 has hit me differently right now. It's still, oh, I want things to be the same again. But yeah, it allows you to do stuff like that, like Michael motherfucking McDonald's stuff. At the end of your respiratory tract, a bunch of balloon-like structures called alvili. Alvili, service swap markets, or auction from the air that you breathed in
Starting point is 00:54:44 is exchanged with the carbon dioxide in your blood. The carbon dioxide goes into the alvele, or alvea, alvely, there we go, where it may be exhaled up through your respiratory tract, out through your nose and mouth. The blood that is newly infused with more oxygen subsequently travels to the rest of your body to provide all your cells with oxygen they need to do stuff like help you wash your belly button, play semi-competitive badminton, juggle bowling pins, you know, cool stuff.
Starting point is 00:55:08 It's viruses and the resulting battle make it down to your lungs and alveoli, it can become pneumonia. When this begins to happen, you can have trouble breathing. Your chest can feel heavy. There's a war being waged in and around your lungs. Nominia is when your alveoli become inflamed and get filled up with fluid, pus, dead cells, those stupid fucking viruses have killed.
Starting point is 00:55:26 Some people have so much trouble breathing, then you need to put on a ventilator. In the worst cases, acute respiratory distress syndrome set in a term for when your lungs are filled with so much fluid, that nearly no amount of breathing support can help. Then as it worsens, no amount of breathing support can help. And then you die. This is how COVID-19 kills you.
Starting point is 00:55:46 It essentially drowns you from the inside out. You can also kill you as is doing this before you drown. It can kill you by sending your body into septic shock. Septic shock is when your immune system sends so many chemicals to fight infection into your bloodstream that your body becomes overly inflamed. Outside of malfunctioning immune systems,
Starting point is 00:56:04 this happens when your body's been so beat to shit that it just throws a hail Mary. It throws everything it has into killing the infection. It goes too far, the defensive reaction to the invasion becomes worse for you than the invasion itself. The inflammation can cause tiny blood clots to form. These can block oxygen and nutrients from reaching vital organs.
Starting point is 00:56:22 You experience a significant drop in blood pressure, and this leads to respiratory or heart failure stroke, failure of other organs and death. This most often occurs in older adults or those with compromised immune systems. Okay, you got to the hardest part. So now we've learned about what a virus is. What coronavirus is are, what COVID-19 is,
Starting point is 00:56:42 how it hurts you, how it's very contagious, seems to be much more deadly than the typical seasonal flu. I may have messed up a term or two, I'm sure I did, but I'm pretty confident that the gist of the info, yeah, just of the info. I gave you a solid thanks to a ton of stellar sources, including some awesome animated video tutorials made by kick ass medical professionals, people smarter than I am. But we still haven't explained why many of the world's governments have essentially shut down their nation's economies. Worldwide governmental response is based on the flattened the curve argument.
Starting point is 00:57:14 We will examine that argument in today's interview. And at the end of the episode, we'll weigh saving lives from COVID-19 versus severe economic or... Reprecussions resulting from forced business shutdowns. And you can decide for yourself what you think of the government's response. Before looking at those arguments, we do need to look at the last truly severe, viral global pandemic we face in 1918 flu, also known as the Spanish flu. Let's learn all about it in today's time, so timeline right after a word from today's
Starting point is 00:57:41 sponsors. Thank you for using your unique URLs when you take advantage of sponsor deals. So they know who sent you and we can keep getting sponsored. Okay. Now we look into the last big global pandemic. The pandemic we're trying to avoid in 2020 with all this shit. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that infected about 500 million people worldwide, about a third of the planet's population at the time, killed at least an estimated 50 million people, possibly as many as a hundred million people, including roughly 675,000 Americans and less than two years' time. Most of them, in a period of around two months, let's learn a whole bunch more about this scenario
Starting point is 00:58:20 the world is trying to avoid in today's time suck timeline. the scenario the world is trying to avoid in today's time suck timeline. Shrap on those boots soldier, we're marching down a time suck timeline. March 11th, 1918, the first known case of the Spanish flu, an H1N1 virus thought to have initially spread to humans from birds, or I'm sorry, from pigs, reported at camp Funston. Initially, it thought to have come from birds. H1N1 viruses also known as influenza A virus subtype H1N1,
Starting point is 00:58:57 a subtype of influenza viruses associated, mostly with an outbreak in 2009, and with a Spanish flu of 1918, 1919. In 2009, an outbreak infected 2009 and with the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. In 2009, an outbreak infected estimated 700 million to 1.4 billion people worldwide according to who. Just over 18,000 people died. This is according to who. The CDC estimates a true number of deaths might have been closer to 300,000. You know, there have been multiple strains of coronaviruses. There have also been multiple strains of H1N1. Camp Funston, no longer in existence,
Starting point is 00:59:27 located on the Fort Riley Military Reservation near Junkson City, Kansas. Junkson, Junkson City, a town of roughly 22,000 just under an hour's drive west of Topeka. The facility, named after Brigidier General Frederick Funston, was the largest of 16 divisional cantonment training camps built during World War I to house and train soldiers for military duty. Construction began in July 1917.
Starting point is 00:59:52 The buildings were laid out uniformly in city block squares with main streets and side streets on either side. An estimated 2800 to 4,000 buildings were constructed to accommodate more than 40,000 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 89th Division stationed at the facility. 40,000 soldiers from the US Army's 89th division stationed at the facility. 40,000 troops living in close quarters, ideal situation for an airborne virus able to live on services, virus similar to COVID-19 to spread. On Monday, March 11th, Albert Gichel, US Army cook reports to the camp hospital with influenza-like symptoms, sore throat, 104 degree fever, headache, early in the morning before breakfast.
Starting point is 01:00:30 By noon, over 100 of his fellow soldiers are reporting similar symptoms. Within a week, over 500 are infected at the base by the end of the month, 1100 troops have been hospitalized and 38 had died after developing pneumonia. Also this same week, sporadic cases of the flu began appearing elsewhere in the US and in Europe and Asia. So is this really where it started? Well no one actually knows 100% for sure. Historians and epidemiologists pretty divided as to its true origins. It would be easier if these viruses had more extreme symptoms, like
Starting point is 01:01:05 if you're, like if you're pinky finger, literally exploded after you'd had it for two days. Then historians could be like, definitely started in Kansas, March 9, 1918. That's when Reggie Williams got it. We know that for sure, because Reggie was a pig farmer. His balls deepened pigs a whole week, and then on the 11th, his pinky blew up. Next day, two of his cousins, his dad, his wife, three kids, all their pinkies blew up. By the end of the week, 30% of the pinkies and all of Gary County had blown off of locals' hands.
Starting point is 01:01:33 And that is how we know that the exploding pinky pandemic of 1918 started there. That's where the first pinkies blew up. But that's not the case. Now, people started getting fevers from a new virus in 1918, while many other people were also getting fevers from similar viruses. People started dying of pneumonia,
Starting point is 01:01:49 brought on by the Spanish flu in 1918 while many other people started, you know, we're dying of pneumonia, brought on by other strains of influenza. So it's hard to locate the exact source of the, you know, when this thing all started. All that being said, there's three main origin theories. 2014 historian Mark Humphreys argues that the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to
Starting point is 01:02:10 work behind the British and French lines in late 1917, early 1918, and World War I might have been the source of the pandemic. But a published report in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers. published report in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers and workers instead found evidence of its circulation in Europe before the early stages of the pandemic. Others think it started in France. In late 1917, military pathologist reported the onset of a new disease with high mortality, they later recognized
Starting point is 01:02:45 as the flu in a hospital camp in Itapla, a major UK World War I troop staging area. The overcrowded camp in hospital was an ideal site for a spreading respiratory virus. The hospital treated thousands of victims from chemical attacks, other casualties of war, and in late 1917, 100,000 soldiers passed with the camp every day. The camp also home to a piggory, fun name for a pig farm. Pole tree regularly brought in for food supplies from surrounding villages, something that a significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated, migrated to pigs, kept near the front, and then bounced to humans.
Starting point is 01:03:20 I have to find a way to work piggory into more conversations. Excuse me, but do you know by a chance of any pigries in the area? I can't find one of my map. And this really need to make it to the PIGORY. The other prevailing theory is that the disease started in 1917, late 1970 in Haskell County, Kansas, about 300 miles west of Camp Funston. Dr. Lauren Miner, Haskell County doctor, warned the editors of public health
Starting point is 01:03:45 reports, appeared reviewed public health journal, established in 1878 by the US Surgeon General, of the US public health service warned them about a new and more deadly variant of a virus. You know, new virus. It produced the common influenza symptoms with new intensity, he said. He said it produced violent headaches, body aches, high fever, non-productive cough. This was violent rapid in his progress through the body, sometimes lethal. This influenza killed, soon dozens of patients, the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county were being struck down as suddenly as if they'd been shot. In the first six months of 1918, miners warning of the influenza of a severe type was the only
Starting point is 01:04:25 reference in that journal to influenza anywhere in the world. If it did originate in this county, how would got their truly a mystery? Very rural county. The whole county had about a thousand people in it in 1917. The Capitol sublet had most of those people around 600 at the time, it had just gotten a post office back in 1913. It's an area known more for grain elevators and tourism, unlikely that someone brought that nasty little virus from someplace else. Did a Haskell County chicken wander too close to a Haskell County Piggory? Maybe with somebody named Reggie, Balls deep and infected swan. I don't know, probably not.
Starting point is 01:05:03 It's probably not helpful for me to say that right there. I ironically the one place no historian or epidemiologist thinks the Spanish flu originated in is Spain So why is it called the Spanish flu? Well that one is easy It's the only virus known to ever figure out how to fluently speak Spanish scientists didn't have electron microscopes in 1918 They couldn't see it but sometimes in hospitals full of infected patients in very quiet moments, you could hear some of the little viruses talking to one another in Spanish. Queres, quieres to ser? Te gusta, to ser.
Starting point is 01:05:34 Te gusta, caliente, veradante. Te gusta la fiebre. Muy caliente. Muy caliente. And of course, that's nonsense. It'd be pretty fucking cool though, you know? That's how you know where the virus is hiding if you just hear it, you know, like he walked into a room.
Starting point is 01:05:48 He just turned off everything and making noise, just listening to the voice, really close, you know? Where are you Spanish flu? No, it's not a key. Ah-ha, I heard that, I heard that. No, it's just a nod, I know so invited. But for real, why was it called the Spanish flu? Well, when it started to wreak havoc on closely-corted American German-French and British troops,
Starting point is 01:06:08 those nations minimized reports of the disease. Their governments lied to journalists, and in some cases made a very clear to journalists that publishing flu outbreaks would be very detrimental to their careers, and they'd be put in prison. There's good old propaganda to keep the war going. We're fine, right? We don't got anything over. We don't, ah, no, nothing, nothing.
Starting point is 01:06:31 It's not a fever sweat, that's a, that's a, that's a glistening my very healthy skin. Spain was neutral in the war, and Spanish papers were free to report on the disease outbreak however they liked, so they did, especially after their king Alfonso, the eighth almost died from the flu to start a June. And because Spain reported more cases than anyone else
Starting point is 01:06:50 in early 1918, because they reported on the pandemic far more often than any other nation, it became known as the Spanish flu. How about that? A more proper name for the Spanish flu would likely be the Kansas flu. Even more damning for Kansas, as far as being the origin of the flu, several residents
Starting point is 01:07:06 of Haskell County, right, where Dr. Lauren Meiner reported that unusual outbreak in late 1917, several of those people ended up at Camp Funston, early March, right before the March 11th documented outbreak. So most likely originated in Kansas. In April, May and June of 1918, however, it actually began, the new virus likely traveled along with American troops deployed to France to fight in World War I. Migos da, vihara, migos vihara. It just bounces over to Europe. Initially, the 1918 pandemic didn't set off too many alarms, mostly because most places it rarely killed,
Starting point is 01:07:42 despite the enormous numbers of people who were infected. Doctors in the British Grand Fleet, for example, admitted 10,313 sailors to sick bay in May and June. Only four of them died, not a panic-inducing number. The virus hit both warring armies in France and April, but the troops dismissed it as three-day fever. And the French army, 24,886 influenza patients were recorded in May with seven deaths, 12,304 in June with 24 deaths,
Starting point is 01:08:11 and then a taper down to 2,369 patients in July with only six deaths. Meanwhile, during the months of May and June 1918, there were 276 influenza deaths in Madrid alone. And I catch your number, tens of thousands have gotten sick, but again, not enough to freak out the world. World War One was freaking out the world. No one outside of a few doctors were really worried
Starting point is 01:08:35 about this new novel virus. The virus they weren't, they weren't even positive was novel because they didn't have, you know, the viral research abilities we have now. By the end of June 1918, the virus had made it all the way to New Zealand, but again, for the most part, still didn't seem that bad. So few people
Starting point is 01:08:50 died initially that a lot of doctors didn't think there was a new flu virus going around. However, there were early, ominous warnings of what would come later. There'll only a few died that spring. Those who did die were often young healthy adults, people whom influenza rarely kills. Also here and there, local outbreaks were not as mild. At one French army post in the spring of 2018, out of a thousand 18 soldiers, six hundred and 88 were hospitalized, 49 died. Five percent of that population of young men died.
Starting point is 01:09:23 And there have been, and there were more deaths in early 1918 that ended up being overlooked because they were misdiagnosed, often as meningitis. A puzzle Chicago pathologist observed lung tissue during the spring of 2018 that was heavy with fluid and full of hemorrhages asked another expert if it represented a new disease. This is what a lot of doctors seem to think has happened with COVID-19 as well. I've talked to some medical personnel who think that some of their elderly patients who died over this past winter did die of COVID-19. That's what they're thinking now. You know, they knew they died of pneumonia at the time, brought on by some kind of upper respiratory
Starting point is 01:09:57 tract infection. They just didn't know a novel virus was the root of that infection that led to the pneumonia that led to acute respiratory distress syndrome. I truly, I've talked about before. I truly think that I had it in February looking back, sick for the whole month and had all the signs. But, you know, I didn't know I thought it was something happened just over in China. And then in July and August, this new virus scene for the most part to die out, yet there were flare ups.
Starting point is 01:10:23 London textile factory had 80 out of 400 workers go home sick one evening in July. Few died though. The virus showed up in South Africa, showed up in Sweden, showed up in many other places in July, but like in London, not that many people died seem like just another flu worse than some maybe, but nothing to truly be alarmed about. Doctors write a loss as to what to recommend to their patients, right? Many urged people to avoid crowded places, simply other people. Others suggested remedies that include eating cinnamon, drinking wine, drinking oxo's meat drink, a beef broth. Thank God, we don't have actual doctors telling us to drink beef broth anymore.
Starting point is 01:11:01 We have idiots like Q and non believers telling us to drink bleach. More on that and today's idiots are the internet, but we don't have doctors telling us to do shit that won't help at all. COVID-19 is scary, but not as scary as the Spanish flu, thanks to modern medicine, thanks to modern understanding of disease. Thank you, doctors and scientists. Thank you epidemiologists and viral specialists. Thanks for all the extra knowledge we can use like a weapon to fight this tiny pathogen is difficult as it may be Random side note Oxo British company supplied marathon runners with cans of oxo beef broth
Starting point is 01:11:33 During the 1908 London Olympic Games oxo a sponsor of the 1908 Olympics. I can only imagine their slogans Oxo beef broth for the serious runner. Telloss that water aside and drink a salty beef broth. The hydrate yourself and back one out with Axo. Put some meat in your race. Fuck it ridiculous. Doctors also told people to keep their mouths and nose covered in public. One point the use of aspirin was blamed
Starting point is 01:11:57 for causing the pandemic. When it actually might have helped people who were infected. And then by August the Spanish flu seemed to say goodbye to the world in 1918. Adios, mundo, lo siento. As US Army Medical Bulletin reported from France and later July, the epidemic is about at an end and has been throughout of a benign type.
Starting point is 01:12:17 A British medical journal stated, flatly in July that influenza has completely disappeared. And then later in the summer of 1918, the virus mutated to a much deadlier strain. How? Well, sometimes it just happens as we talked about earlier. For some reason, little virus that had recently mutated into a form that could spread from bird to pig to human mutated again and became far deadlier came back in a big way. It doesn't seem that the temperature of the summer in 1918 was why the virus kind of like calm down for a while.
Starting point is 01:12:50 I know that gets talked about a lot now that doesn't seem to have been the case. In August, the affliction resurfaces in Switzerland in a form so virulent that a US Navy intelligence officer and a report stamped secret and confidential warned quote the disease now epidemic throughout Switzerland is what is commonly known as the black plague. Although it is designated as Spanish sickness. Fuck. Estoy de la Véltaria is stupidity list by thought of those.
Starting point is 01:13:19 And no one reports not because of the war effort. Don't want to demoralize anyone. In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain to Spanish flu. As these ships arrive in cities like Breast and France, Boston, the U.S., free town in West Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic begins, the war pushes this disease all around the world. The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease. Says James Harris at historian at Ohio State University
Starting point is 01:13:51 who studies both infectious disease in World War I. He says the entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread. September 1st, 2019, the hospital at Camp Devons, Army training base 35 miles from Boston, the team with 45,000 soldiers could accommodate 1200 patients. On September 1st, it held just 84 patients. This is right before the second wave
Starting point is 01:14:21 hit. A week later, on September 7th, a soldier is sent to the hospital delirious screaming when he's touched. He's diagnosed with meningitis. Miningitis, by the way, is an inflammation of the meninges, membranes covering the spinal cord and brain. Sometimes the cause of meningitis is viral, sometimes bacterial. The next day on the eighth, dozen more men from the soldier's company, diagnosed with meningitis. More men fall ill the following day, and now physicians change the diagnosis for meningitis to influenza.
Starting point is 01:14:50 Suddenly an army report notes the influenza occurs as an explosion. A second wave had definitely hit. The virus, which probably started out in Kansas, then traveled across the pond, infected, and infected, replicated and replicated, mutated. Now it's come back home.
Starting point is 01:15:07 At the outbreaks peak in this Boston area, Camp Devons Hospital, several weeks later, 15, that are 1543 soldiers will report ill with influenza in just a single day. The hospital facilities will become completely overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses sick with too few cafeteria workers to feed patients a staff because they're sick. The hospital ceased accepting patients no matter how ill, leaving thousands more sick and dying in the nearby barracks. Hospital started to literally lock their doors, shut their doors at this time.
Starting point is 01:15:38 This exact type of scenario is what social distancing and shelter-in-place mandates are hoping to avoid. On September 29th, a doctor at Camp Devons, Dr. Roy Grist wrote a letter to a fellow physician describing conditions at the camp, a letter that would be forgotten for many years and then be found decades later in a trunk in Detroit filled with other medical papers given to the University of Michigan. Here is Dr. Grist letter in its entirety. And this is crazy. Just think this is written on the 29th. At the start of this month, on the first, the hospital is pretty much dead. Right. They have, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of open beds. And then, you know, four weeks later, Dr. Gris writes, my dear, Bert, it is more than likely that you
Starting point is 01:16:20 would be interested in the news of this place. For there was a possibility that you will be assigned here for duty. So having a minute between rounds, I will try to tell you a little bit about the situation here as I have seen it in the last week. As you know, I have not seen much pneumonia in the last few years in Detroit. So when I came here, I was somewhat behind the niceties of the army way of intricate diagnosis. Also to make it good, I have had for the last week an exacerbation of my old ear rot, as RT-O will call it, and cannot use a stethoscope at
Starting point is 01:16:52 all, but had to get by a my ability to spot them through my general knowledge of pneumonia. Camp Devons is near Boston and has about 50,000 men, or did have before this epidemic broke loose. It also has the base hospital for the division of the Northeast. This epidemic started about four weeks ago and has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed. All assemblages of soldiers taboo. These men start with what appears to be an attack of legrip or influenza. And when brought to the hospital, they very rapidly developed the most vicious type of pneumonia
Starting point is 01:17:28 that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission, they have the mahogany spots over the cheekbones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis, extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white. Quick note, yes, the language is considered racist by today's vernacular norms. It was 1918. Also cyanosis, a bluish or purpleish, a purpleish discoloration of the skin due to deficient levels of oxygenation. There we go, the blood.
Starting point is 01:18:01 Dr. Gris continues, it is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand to see it to, one can stand it to see one, two, or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day and still keeping it up. Funny language there. Two or 20 men dying a day. I get it, yeah, that's life. I said, I cook your crumbles, yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:32 That's what I signed up for when I became a doctor. But 100, well that grinds my gears, really. Chaps yield backside. Back to Dr. Grist. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a new mixed infection here, but what I don't know. My total time is taking up hunting ralls, ralls dry or moist, sibilant or creptant or any other of the hundred things that one may find in the chest.
Starting point is 01:18:59 They all mean but one thing here, pneumonia. And that means in about all cases, death. Another quick medical note, uh, Rawls are abnormal crackling or rattling sounds heard upon, uh, us, quotation of the chest caused by disease or congestion of the lungs. It'll listen for these little sounds. How terrifying for him to say that finding out that someone had pneumonia almost always meant death, back to Dr. Grist, the normal number of doctors here is about 25, and that has been increased to over 250, all of whom, of course, accepting me, have temporary orders, return to your proper station on completion of work. Mine says permanent duty, but I have been in the army just long enough to learn that it
Starting point is 01:19:39 doesn't always mean what it says. So I don't know what will happen to me at the end of this. We have lost an outrageous number of nurses and doctors, and the little town of air is a site. It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days, there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce. We used to go down to the morgue, which is just back of my ward, and look at the boys laid out in long rows. It beats any site they ever had in France after a battle. An extra long barracks has been vacated for the use of the morgue and it would make any man sit up and take notice
Starting point is 01:20:10 to walk down the long lines of dead soldiers all dressed up and laid out in double rows. We have no relief here. You get up in the morning at 5.30 and work steady till about 9.30 p.m. sleep then go at it again. Some of the men of course have been here all the time and they are tired. If this letter seems somewhat disconnected over look it. For I have been called away from it a dozen times the last time just now by the officer of the day who came in to tell me that they have not as yet found at any of the autopsies any case beyond the red hepatitis stage. It kills them before it gets that far. I don't wish you any hard-luckled men, but do wish you were here for at least a while. It kills them before it gets that far. I don't wish you any hard
Starting point is 01:20:45 luckold man, but do wish you were here for at least a while. It's more comfortable when one has a friend about the men here are all good fellows, but I get so damn sick of pneumonia that when I eat, I want to find some fellow who will not talk shop, but there ain't none know how. We eat it, sleep it, and dream it to say nothing of breathing at 16 hours a day. I would be very grateful indeed if you would drop me a line or two once in a while. And I will promise you that if you ever get into a fix like this, I will do the same for you. Each man here gets a ward with about 150 beds. Mine has 168 and has an assistant chief to boss him.
Starting point is 01:21:20 And you can imagine that the paperwork alone is fierce and the government demands all paperwork be kept in good shape I have only four day nurses and five night nurses a warm master for orderlies So you can see that we are busy. I write this in piecemeal fashion It may be a long time before I can get another letter to you, but we'll try goodbyeld pal God be with you telling me to again keep the bulls open Roy Sadly, I can't find any records of what happened to Dr. Grist after that letter. And again, this is exactly why governments around the world are trying to flatten the
Starting point is 01:21:54 curve. If too many people get sick too quickly, a virus can completely overwhelm a nation's medical infrastructure. And there can be scenarios like Dr. Gris just described occurring all over the world. Luckily, the current strain of COVID-19 is not this virulent. Please do what most viruses do and do not mutate into something more deadly. The second wave of this managed flu spread fast, killed faster than his predecessor in late 1918. People would wake up feeling sick for the first time and often be dead by lunch. The virus had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours
Starting point is 01:22:30 of showing the first signs of infection. Jesus Christ. If COVID-19 did that, I'm guessing we'd all be harshly quarantined in some kind of martial law type situation. Maybe comforting to know that as bad as COVID-19 is, the second wave of the Spanish flu was much worse. Healed so fast. Maybe comforting to know that as bad as COVID-19 is, the second wave of the Spanish flu was much worse. Healed so fast.
Starting point is 01:22:48 By the time of Dr. Gris Letter, this new virus had made it out of camp devins down to Boston and elsewhere. It began to ravage the civilian Boston population by the end of September and much of the rest of the world. William C. Woodward, the health commissioner of Boston from 1918 to 1922 posted a one-page paper notice called a broadside all over Boston asking residents to avoid other residents. The notice had three sections. First, what to do until the doctor comes, second, advice to attendants, and then third,
Starting point is 01:23:17 how to avoid infection generally. And that third section, the city of Boston Health Department advises residents to avoid contagion, keep out of Boston Health Department advises residents to avoid contagion, keep out of places where people are. Do not let anyone cough, etc. into your face. Keep your mouth shut. Wash your hands frequently. Avoid getting tired.
Starting point is 01:23:34 Go to bed early. Eat your meals regularly and slowly. If compelled to eat away from home, see that the dishes and cups are clean. Keep where the air is fresh. Keep away from any place the disease is. So basically the 1918 equivalent of 2020 social distancing. Plus some weird shit like two-year food slowly.
Starting point is 01:23:54 Yeah, because a long time ago. And Dr. Dinnow is much as they knew now. Pat, I love that one. Two-year food slowly associated with the disease. I just pictured this the fucking tensest family dinners, right? It's so quiet. Very little to no talking.
Starting point is 01:24:09 Everyone just chewing, you know, taking so many, you know, just chewing each bite so many times and just stress silence. Little Billy, extra hungry. Thanks to a gross bird, he's powering through his pot roast, like he's training for a future competitive eating. Dad's snapping on him. Just Billy, dammit boy! Do you want to be infected? power through his pot roast like he's training for a future competitive eating dad snap it on him.
Starting point is 01:24:25 Just Billy dammit boy. Do you want to be infected? You want to quickly chew your way into an early grave? Slow down into your food before they kill us all. And please dear, stop shutting the windows. This house gets any stuff here and we'll all be dead. Fresh air. That's what we need.
Starting point is 01:24:39 This epidemic took over the lives of all Bostonians. In mid September to the Boston Globe reported on the city, planning to keep schools open, saying neither Dr. William H. divine medical director of the schools nor Dr. W. C. Woodward, City Health Commissioner is in favor of closing Boston schools. They say that, you know, by remaining at their studies, pupils are less likely to become affected, especially since teacher school physicians and nurses are doing everything in their power to head off the epidemic, but that wouldn't happen. Teachers and nurses couldn't, of course, ward off shit. The city would change its mind about schools staying open just a few days later.
Starting point is 01:25:14 Things turn for the worst very quickly. By the end of the month, people are panicking. No one understands why the disease is spreading so quickly, how to prevent it. By the end of September, officials in Boston began forbidding public gatherings. They're desperate to try to control the spread of the disease. Schools are closed. Theaters, bars, churches are asked not to hold services. Just like many parts of the US and other nations are closed now. City hospitals are flooded with patients. There's an urgent need for doctors and nurses, especially during this time because so many are overseas helping the war effort. Sadly, even by the end of the month, coffins couldn't be supplied at the rate they were
Starting point is 01:25:47 needed. The September diary entries of a 36 year old Bostonian, Edith Coffin Mahoney provides to glimpse the life and Massachusetts as it descends into the Spanish flu's second wave of the outbreak. The diary either keeps his full descriptions of lovely golf outings at the club, picnics, shopping, friends visits during the final days of August and into September. And then her daily entries suddenly mentioned influenza and then death. September 22, 1918, fair and cold.
Starting point is 01:26:15 Pawn Frank here, dinner just got back from Jefferson Highlands, Rob played golf with Dr. Ferguson and Mr. Warren. Eugene F went to the hospital Friday with Spanish influenza, 1500 cases in Salem. Brad Street Parker died of it yesterday, 21 years old. So, 10th, 24th. Mr. Freeman here. Eugene is developed pneumonia from Spanish influenza, serious epidemic everywhere. Can carrots, went to 93 with children. PM, Myra and Ella go to Grey's Intimales. She's very succinct. Her entry's here. Oh, fuck, a shorthand. So, 10th, 26th, torrential rain's in tomorrow. She's very succinct. Her entry's here. Oh, fucking shorthand. September 26th, torrential rain for 24 hours, beginning at 3 a.m. today,
Starting point is 01:26:49 some thunder in the PM. Most depressing day after bad news from Eugene, he died at 640 a.m., several thousand cases in the city with a great shortage of nurses and doctors. Theaters, churches, gatherings of every kind have been stopped. Even fourth, Liberty Loan, drivers, Par parade postponed. Lucky that parade was stopped or either might have died. That parade would go on in Philadelphia. It would be disastrous. So, December 27th, fair part of the day, but cold, had L. Wood noise, get boiler ready and started furnace fire out with kiddies in PM, called it Ma's. Bell there was a bell there with a horse cold,
Starting point is 01:27:25 pod right here from office the past three days. Harriet, NASA, school to see Agnes who has influenza. Rob home from New York at midnight came instead of tomorrow on account of Eugene's funeral. September 28th, beautiful mild day, Robin bed all day with high fever, bound up head and aching eyeballs. Could not be Paul Bear at Eugene's funeral at Grace Church, prompt measures with hot lemonade, castor oil, aspirin, et cetera, induced sweat by afternoon. So he felt much better in evening phone, but not, but did not call Dr. Sargent. September 29th, beautiful mild day, Rob, very much better. Husky throat, the only symptom left up at noon.
Starting point is 01:28:02 Dr. Sargent said to keep him tomorrow, met him as I was going to 93 with children in the PM. James Tierney died Friday of pneumonia, 37 years old. Dr. says there is no sign of the epidemic abating. Eda then her husband and children would survive the flu. Eda's would live long enough for the great depression to kill her. She committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 50. The fluid killed roughly 200,000 in the US alone at the age of 50. The fluid killed roughly 200,000 in the US alone by the end of October. The impact on the population was so severe that a 1918 American life expectancy dropped by 12 years. In the US, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu just in the month of October. And unlike a normal seasonal flu, which mostly claims victims among
Starting point is 01:28:44 the very young and the very old, the second wave of the Spanish flu exhibited what's called a W curve. High numbers of deaths among the young and the old, but a huge spike in the middle composed of otherwise healthy 25 to 35 year olds in the prime of their lives. October 1918 would become the deadliest month in American history, as a contagion of likes of which not have been seen since the days of the black death raged across the country and around the world. Life in much of America came to a standstill in October 1918. Municipalities, shutter public gatherings, you know, shut, close down schools, churches, theaters, loons.
Starting point is 01:29:19 When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still decades away with the CDC, decades away from establishment responses to the pandemic vary from city to city. In San Francisco, judges hold court sessions outside in public squares. Citizens who do not wear protective goss masks dubbed mask slackers by the press could be fine $5. Even sent to jail. Public service posters said obey the, wear the goss.
Starting point is 01:29:47 Arguing the children can be safer, surrounded by school nurses than at home, New York City Health Commissioner Royal Copeland chooses to keep school open, along with other public venues. In one concession, Copeland mandates staggering, opening and closing hours of businesses and factories in order to minimize rush hour crowds on subway trains.
Starting point is 01:30:04 More soldiers are dying of the flu than on World War One battlefields in October. But President Woodrow Wilson does not mandate any type of nationwide shelter in place. Marshal law is not enacted. The economy is not stopped. And the national press is not really reporting on it being a serious pandemic. Why the war effort can't bring down morale. The previous year, President Wilson had rammed through Congress the Sedition Act, making it a crime to say or publish anything
Starting point is 01:30:31 negative that would affect the war effort. Wilson created what was called the committee for public information. The architect of that committee said truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms. The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false. Okay? And so in the US, you had national public health leaders saying things like, this is ordinary influenza by another name.
Starting point is 01:30:57 Similar to COVID-19, it was up to local leaders to handle the crisis. Some handled it much better than others. Thousands would die in Philadelphia in October, thanks to a parade at the end of September. On September 28th and Philly, the city that would be hit harder than any other city in the US, the Liberty Loan Parade was not halted.
Starting point is 01:31:15 A parade to promote government bonds that help pay for the allied cause in Europe. Thousands become infected. The city morgue built to hold 36 bodies was now faced with the arrival of hundreds by October 1st, hundreds a day by October 1st, every hospital bed in the city is filled, the entire city is quickly quarantined, over 11,000 city residents die in Philadelphia of the flu in October.
Starting point is 01:31:36 The city is on the verge of total collapse as a functioning city that month. Drivers of open cards can be heard all day long circling city streets yelling, bring out your dead. Bring out your dead. They deposit collected corpses and mask graves that have been dug by steam shovels. Different story plays out in St. Louis 900 miles away within two days of detecting its first cases among civilians. The city closes schools, playgrounds, libraries, courtrooms, churches, work shifts are staggered, street car ridership is strictly limited, public gatherings are more than 20 people forbidden.
Starting point is 01:32:11 St. Louis, St. Louis would have half the deaths per capita that Philly had. And Philadelphia was 719 people per 100,000 inhabitants. And St. Louis, it was 347 per 100,000. Early action appeared to have saved thousands of lives. That's why St. Louis gets it was 347 per 100,000. A early action appeared to have saved thousands of lives. That's why St. Louis gets pointed to a lot now with the shelter in place mandates. Over a four day period in October, the hospital at Camp Pike in Arkansas, four runner to Camp Robinson, emits 8,000 soldiers. Francis Blake, a member of the Army Special Nimonio unit, describes the scene saying,
Starting point is 01:32:42 every corridor, and there are miles of them with double rows of cots with influenza patients. There is only death and destruction. Yet just seven miles away in Little Rock, a headline in the Gazette Reads, Spanish influenza is plain, legripped, same old fever and chills. Why weren't they taking it seriously because the federal government purposefully was withholding information regarding how deadly the
Starting point is 01:33:04 disease was forbidding the press from reporting on it nationally. In November, the virus almost wipes out a small Alaskan village, the Inuit village located just outside of Brevig Mission, Alaska, a town of around 400 now, around 100 back in 1918 when it wasn't even incorporated, when it was known as Teller Mission. The little village was near Nomalaska on the sewer peninsula that comes within 60 miles, a Siberia, a remnant of the Barrain Land Bridge that once brought early humans from Asia to North and South America, this village had 80 adult residents. Five days later, the Spanish flu had killed 72 of them.
Starting point is 01:33:41 They lost 90% of their adults in five days, holy shit. And November the number of infected in the US and most of the world dips significantly though, rising again on armistice day, on November 11th to celebrate the end of the war, how ironic. Yay, the war is over. So many less people are gonna die now.
Starting point is 01:33:59 Queue so many people getting sick and die. The disease continues to kill more Americans die from the Spanish flu than would die in World War One. More Americans would die from the Spanish flu than would die in all the wars of the 20th century combined. This is a great comparison to show how serious this pandemic was. This pandemic killed more Americans, killed more young, healthy Americans than World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, the Gulf War, several other wars and Vietnam combined. By December 1918, the deadly second wave of the Spanish-Ludd finally passed, but the
Starting point is 01:34:33 pandemic was still not over. A third wave erupted in Australia in January of 1919, eventually works its way back to Europe and the United States. In San Francisco in January, 1800 flu cases, 101 deaths are reported in the first five days of the month. 706 cases of influenza, 67 deaths are reported in New York City, triggering fear of a recurrence of more flu activity, but the disease would not rage again like it had in October and November of 1918.
Starting point is 01:35:01 By the summer of 1919, the disease had almost completely gone away. Her immunity had been reached. So many people had been infected. It was harder to keep the pathogen bouncing around from host to host. T-sales ready to fight it. And maybe something else happened. Maybe mutated again into a less virulent strain. You know, viruses sad. Just let me go to Stolemutri Stiaora. And then, you know, by early 2020, it had gone completely away by all accounts. So now let's hop out of this timeline, talk about the totality of the devastation, the virus lived in this path.
Starting point is 01:35:30 Get to your interview. You know, the interview I did with Amy Ward, our specialist, and then hop into the edits of the internet. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. You've made it back barely. First thing I want to address post timeline really quick is, how do we know that the virus of the first wave is the same as the virus of the second much to other wave? Because I wonder them, like, well, maybe it's just a different virus.
Starting point is 01:36:01 Nope. Because of immunity, areas hit hard by the weaker strain of the first wave showed, you know, greater immunity to the second wave virus. This was dramatically illustrated in Copenhagen, Denmark, escaped with a combined mortality rate of just 0.29%. Copenhagen was hit hard by the first wave of the flu, which wasn't nearly as deadly. You know, it killed only 0.02% of those infected, those thoughts who had been infected, you know, it killed only 0.02% of those infected. Those thoughts have been infected, you know. And then when the second wave came through, only point, you know, I'm sorry, you know,
Starting point is 01:36:32 let's let's then, you know, 0.5% died. This was compared to an overall mortality rate worldwide of somewhere around 2.5%. So, you know, why were they spared the second time around? Well, because when the virus first came around before it mutated, it infected a lot of them and they built up some immunity. And while 2.5% doesn't seem like a big number, it really is. Most of those deaths came with an period of two months during the second wave. If 2.5% of all Americans died in two months, that would be over 8 million.
Starting point is 01:37:00 To put that in perspective, that number, think about if you're old enough, how scary the age crisis was in the 80s and 90s How much press it received you probably know somebody who died I do right? I would say that the age crisis in the US, you know Was the last really scary health crisis before this one roughly 700,000 people in the US have died of AIDS total since 19-21 If everyone in the US caught you equivalent on the second wave of the Spanish flu, over 8 million would die. That's a very scary number. Certain parts of the world, the mortality rate for the Spanish flu was actually much higher than 2.5%. In Iran, the mortality rate was very high, according to one estimate, between 902,000 and 2,431,000
Starting point is 01:37:41 died. 8 to 22% of the total population. Some 12 to 17 million people died in India, about 5% of their population. And Tahiti, 13% of the population died in one month alone. Estimates of death tolls vary wildly, generally between 1 and 6% of the world's 1918 population is thought to have died. Current population in the world is thought to be 7.8 billion. Apply that one to 6% fatality rate to today's population and the virus, you know, an equivalent virus would kill between 78 and 468 million people in sane numbers. So are we dealing with an
Starting point is 01:38:18 equivalent disease? Is the world's response to this disease appropriate, excessive, not enough? Let's find out what someone who knows a whole hell of a lot more than I do about pathogens things. Let's cut now to a special interview I conducted this past Thursday night, March 26th, with someone working on the front lines to stop COVID-19, Amy Ward. So here with us on time, Suck, I'm very happy to have Amy Ward, MSRNCIC. Amy has a master's in infection prevention and epidemiology, registered nurse, board certified in infection prevention and control, so she knows a lot more than I do
Starting point is 01:38:51 or ever will about viruses. So thank you. Thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here. Yeah, I can't imagine how busy you are right now. It's crazy. I've been putting in so many hours at work. Yeah, it's crazy.
Starting point is 01:39:04 But it's good. I've been training for this and hours at work. Yeah, it's crazy, but it's good. I've been training for this and waiting for it my whole life, so. Well, I'm glad we have people like you right now to handle this because we would be in so much more trouble. If we didn't, that's what I've been thinking about a lot lately is just, you know, you take things for granted in life, and especially if you've been lucky enough to be healthy. You know, I'm probably one of those people who looked at going to the doctors as almost like an irritation of like, I gotta go for my checkup, or I gotta go for this.
Starting point is 01:39:31 Yeah, just have always taken it for granted. I've been very lucky that way. And now I'm really appreciating the entire medical community in a very different way, because you guys are our only defense against a situation like this. It feels like a war that only you guys can fight. Yeah, it's kind of scary and there's a lot of unknowns still at this point. Yeah, and it definitely feels like we're gearing up for a war at this point in time. So who knows
Starting point is 01:40:02 what the next few weeks will hold, but we're trying to just get ready for it and be prepared to face that battle if we have to. Now I didn't realize just with some kind of terminology before this last week, this isn't the first coronavirus, humanity has encountered previous strains of the coronavirus like with SARS, the outbreak in 2003, MERS in 2012. Now when those viruses were first discovered, weren't they also novel viruses that we didn't have vaccinations for? Yeah, definitely.
Starting point is 01:40:29 So, there's quite a few coronaviruses that are normal transmission among humans. I've heard about a hundred of them. Wow. I know about four as a nurse that we test for regularly in patients. And they circulate every year among humans, and they're the cause of a common cold. About 10 to 30% of your normal colds will be caused by a coronavirus. But these novel coronaviruses are new coronaviruses.
Starting point is 01:40:59 Have made a transition from animals to humans, and that's what makes them new and human immune systems have never seen them before. Right. And that's why they can end up being so severe or infecting so many people. Now, what I'm curious about is because this is not the first novel coronavirus we've encountered, you know, like there was, again, SARS and MERS, but the response globally to COVID-19 is so much different than it was to these previous viruses.
Starting point is 01:41:30 Why is that? Why are we shutting everything down now and we haven't done that before in my lifetime? For sure. Yeah, it's definitely a different feeling than we've ever had and just looking at you, I think we're probably close in age, but I remember SARS kind of when I was in high school or maybe like early college years and the threat wasn't as severe, they didn't shut anything down. And I think a lot of this, maybe the social media piece, I think there's a lot of
Starting point is 01:42:01 stuff on social media and just the media in general covering this Yeah But again with SARS and MERS we have not had near the amount of infected people throughout the world that we have with this coronavirus Just some figures that I've seen There was about 8,000 cases of SARS in 2003 to 2002 to 2003 which is Pretty wimpy and it only went through a few threes. Again, MERS has kind of just had this low level of transmission starting in 2013,
Starting point is 01:42:36 2014 and then just kind of carrying through and there's only been about 2,500 cases or so of MERS. And so, you know, this we've talked today, you know, I think we're somewhere in the 300,000 range worldwide. Right, okay. The United States today surpassed the highest level that China reported. And so just the amount of people who we have identified,
Starting point is 01:43:00 and some of that could also be due to our testing capabilities. We've over the years since 2002, we've developed a lot of rapid analysis tests like PCR that are readily available throughout nations and countries. And they're easy to perform. They give you fast results. And so that could also be a reason for this level of panic
Starting point is 01:43:23 or concern that we're identifying a lot more people who may probably be affected. Yes, so there may have been more SARS cases. The testing wasn't available to find out who had it, the analysis enabled. Potentially. Now, why do you think this particular virus is spreading faster than those? It just happens to be, I know every virus is different, every virus is spreading faster than those two is it just happens to be I know every virus is different every virus is unique It just happens to be more easily, you know transmissible. It's just more effective You know just the world we live in today also. I mean we do so much travel for work and for pleasure that we're just constantly Getting on planes and going place to place to place and you know that that you know may have been on the rise in the early 2000s but I
Starting point is 01:44:09 don't think it was as commonplace as it is today and so just travel and just the way that we live life these days I think also increases the likelihood of this severe transmission. I was also looking at some of the transmissibility rates of these viruses and SARS had about 2 to 5 percent transmissibility rate and that leads to it. If you're infected, you can get 2 to 5 other people infected if you come in to contact with them. So just on average for like the population general,
Starting point is 01:44:45 each person infected will get two to five others infected, okay? And there's a lot of assumptions in these infectivity rates. They're called the R-NOT or R-CEP-0 value. And that is a pretty complex calculation. And there's a lot of assumptions built into that calculation. Yeah, like how many people you'd meet and all that stuff? Right. If you're on a East Day home, you're never
Starting point is 01:45:08 going to come into contact with people. But if you live in a city with the highest population density in the world, like in South Korea, your R-N-O-T value may be higher in that type of situation. Yeah. Somebody in Manhattan is going to infect more people if they're walking to work than somebody in northern Idaho that never leaves the house, right? Exactly. Yeah, and so with stars and this COVID we're thinking it's around
Starting point is 01:45:32 when you know one or two to like three or four To infect you know one or two people up to three or four people if you come into contact So and that's for COVID-19? Yes. So, actually not far. So far. So maybe no more transmissible than SARS was. Right. That's what it looks like at this point.
Starting point is 01:45:52 Okay. And then, you know, if you compare that to measles, yeah. Measles are not value is up to about 17 or 18. Okay. So much higher. I mean, that's a lot more people that if you come into contact and they're not immune, you can get about 17 or 18 people infected.
Starting point is 01:46:06 Wow. So, these people is highly transmissible where, you know, these are much less. And that explains part, I mean, to me, at least a little bit why, you know, when people from Europe hundreds of years ago encountered, you know, other people who had never contacted the measles virus before, why it was so devastating, just so infective. Okay. Okay. Right, right. And then, you know, measles, we do have a great vaccine and we do have, in most populations,
Starting point is 01:46:31 probably 70, 80% immunity due to vaccination. And so that's why we don't worry too much about measles. We'd like to see up to about more 95% vaccination rates to prevent that or not. Yep. Yep. And so, and a really quick note in that I did an episode before on, you know, kind of the anti-vaccination movement. And I feel like that's a real common problem is just a lack of understanding of what
Starting point is 01:46:57 herd immunity is. And I feel like the anti-vaccination community doesn't understand that concept where, you know, if it's not about just them not getting vaccinated and risking their families or themselves, it's about putting everyone at risk. Right. Because, you know, the more people who are immune, the less easy the disease can spread and it's easier to contain, correct?
Starting point is 01:47:18 Yeah, and, you know, that vaccination discussion is a whole other topic. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. With this, it's new to humans. And so we've never seen this before. Right. It does make having that herd immunity a big challenge.
Starting point is 01:47:35 And from everything I've read, I know certain people in the media have thrown out other timelines. But it doesn't seem like a vaccination will actually go into commercial production anytime before 12 months. Like 12 to 18 months is what seems to be actually reasonable. That's what I keep hearing also. When we look back at the swine flu, the H1N1 flu a few years back in 2009, a few years, it's 10 years. Yeah. You know, you see that they developed that vaccine pretty rapidly.
Starting point is 01:48:09 And that was because we already knew a lot about influenza vaccines, how to manufacture them, safety and efficacy. Okay. And so really getting that modeling correct was pretty quick to production time and getting the vaccine live. This is a new virus and it's also an RNA virus and yeah what is the difference between RNA and DNA viruses? So there's viruses are really weird and not an expert in
Starting point is 01:48:36 virology by any means but I feel like it's really work to work closely as we respond to this with a virologist. But so DNA viruses, viruses aren't living. They're just a protein capsule filled with some DNA, right? They have receptors on the outside that allow them to bind to a host cell and inject their DNA or RNA. And then they take that host cell hostage and they use their machinery to replicate their protein and DNA or RNA, package it up. When they get enough of those pre-packaged virions, they call them, it bursts the host cell,
Starting point is 01:49:18 open kills that host cell, and then you release a ton of viral particles into the host. Yeah. And so DNA manufacturing is pretty succinct. It's a pretty easy process. OK. But RNA manufacturing is pretty messy because RNA is the middle message from DNA to protein. So when you're trying to transcribe RNA, you can have a lot of mistakes. It can get pretty sloppy. And so that's why there's a lot of, you know, they call it like sway
Starting point is 01:49:52 or I forget the term that's on social media right now, but you get a lot of potential mutations in that process when you're trying to replicate this RNA because the host cell actually turns it back to DNA and then back to RNA and then to protein. So it kind of has to do a backward step. Is the RNA still a little double helix of genetic coding? Is the RNA or no? Yeah, no it's a single strand. Single strand, okay.
Starting point is 01:50:21 So when you do DNA it kind of splits into two strands and then it attaches to one strand, the transcriptase and it transcribes one strand of DNA into one strand of RNA. Oh, wow. Okay. And so there's a directionality to it also, which is complicated, but there's a directionality and this is a positive strand RNA virus. Right. Okay. So that now, when you're saying there's a directionality and this is a positive strand RNA virus. Right. Okay. So now when you're saying there's more chance for things to be mutated, is that also, is there also a greater risk for a coronavirus compared to like an H1N1 type virus to mutate
Starting point is 01:50:59 and become more deadly or more transmissible? Is there concern that way too? Because I know when I was looking in the, you know, like the big problem with the Spanish flu years ago was that it seemed to be not too fatal initially, and then the second wave came where people think it mutated and then it was much more deadly. Is there any fear amongst your peers that this new virus could do that?
Starting point is 01:51:24 Yeah, I haven't gone too far into thinking about that. I'm trying to... It's not a fun thought. I know, yes. I'm trying to think about the opposite and think about what if it's really sloppy and it loses its ability to bind to our host cell. Then we have these pockets of people in different areas in different countries where this whole thing just fizzles out because now it's mutated and now I can't infect
Starting point is 01:51:52 you if we come into contact because my variant particles have lost that ability to find. So that's what I'm hopeful for is that we'll kind of lose that and I don't know for certain if that's what happened with SARS, but that's kind of what appears to have happened with that. So that is a possibility? I thought that when they kind of had a negative mutation, I guess, for the virus, that that virus wouldn't just then go on, you know, wouldn't be able to be transmitted.
Starting point is 01:52:19 I guess I didn't realize that that could happen on a wider scale, where if a bunch of the viruses start to kind of break down and, you know, three mutations become weaker, that's how a virus can kind of fizzle out, I guess, because I've never understood that part. Like, why does a virus, it'll spread, and then like, just go away. I don't understand how it just goes away.
Starting point is 01:52:39 I don't know if I understand. They're so mysterious, just in general. They're such weird little things where they're not an animal, they're not a plant, they're just like their own strange little entity. Yeah, they're super weird. And I did not ever get super far into viruses.
Starting point is 01:52:55 My studies, because they're super complex. Even doing like deep research, I mean, you know, you reach a point with a lot of the research where the experts are just like, yeah, we don't know. Like, we're trying to figure it out still, but they're very strange, little, you know, little, very hard to understand in some ways,
Starting point is 01:53:12 kind of entities, you know, like, and especially to treat, where like a bacteria, you can kill it, but a virus isn't even alive. I don't, it's, yeah. Yeah, and so when you do viral treatments, you worry about, you don't want to kill the host cell that all the viruses are living in. Yeah. Because that would be detrimental to your life. And so you try and, you know, dismantle the machinery that are replicating
Starting point is 01:53:37 the virus, which can also be very detrimental to the host cell because the host cell relies upon all of those things. So trying to dismantle how it attaches and focus on different aspects of those viruses, but those mutations kind of make that an even harder challenge because you think you've got the answer and the virus mutates again and tricks you. Now, with the antics, I know the basic two strategies for my understanding with the virus is obviously you want a vaccine to give to people so they can't get it. But then for the people who have it, you need a quick diagnostic, a test so we can get results fast to find out if they have it and then if they have it, antiviral, some kind of cocktail. From what I looked into, it looks a little grim
Starting point is 01:54:27 on the antiviral front. Because you gotta get it so quickly and to keep it from replicating, is there any optimism around an antiviral treatment? You know, they try a lot of the Oceltamiviar in China and other countries and it didn't really show that's tamiflu. It didn't really show effectiveness.
Starting point is 01:54:51 And some of the literature out there shows that they kind of just threw a bunch of stuff at people. Yeah, like Z-Pants? Is it the last year? Yeah. And so it's really hard to say what was effective and what wasn't. And so I think we just don't know at this point. We just have this massive response and a ton of people thick and it's been really hard
Starting point is 01:55:11 to do good research and try and really figure out how to help people. So yeah, I mean at this point, it doesn't sound super hopeful. I mean, if this inspires stays within humans and makes another wave in a year to hopefully we'll know a lot more about it, it's going to be better. But at this point, it doesn't feel super hopeful. Now the incubation, maybe I'm not getting the term right, but the incubation period is about what? Five days for most people, does that mean that it takes the virus once it goes into your
Starting point is 01:55:44 system five days to replicate, or is it replicating faster than that? So, typically it replicates faster than that. So you can just have a few virus that attach to the cells, this virus attaches to the cells in your respiratory tract. Yeah. So they can attach and they'll start replicating and you won't really feel much until you get to like kind of a critical map The viral load has to increase enough to feel it. Yeah, exactly
Starting point is 01:56:10 And so that's kind of that five to seven day point where you're like, oh man, I feel like crap And you have a lot of violence at that point and based on everything I know we don't know much and I know this is all so new and happening so fast I think a big question maybe the biggest question on a lot of people's minds is, is the government response in the US and probably other countries, is it what it should be, is it not enough or is it excessive?
Starting point is 01:56:36 That's a really hard question. So I read a quote and I forget where it came from a few weeks ago and it said, everything we do in preparation will feel alarmist. But everything that we do when we get to, everything that we did when we get to recovery will feel like it wasn't enough. That's great.
Starting point is 01:56:54 And so it's really hard to say what we should be doing or what we shouldn't be doing. Yeah. And you know, I'm grateful that we've kind of really socialized the idea of social distancing and people are embracing it. Right. I feel like it's a social thing to do social distancing right now. I see everybody's like social media posts.
Starting point is 01:57:16 Yeah. But like you're not actually really helping because you're still around people. Like this is good social distancing're doing now. But having drinks in the in the driveway, you know, there's still a little bit of involved in that. So, what the government's response has been, you know, I think we've heard that the strategic national stockpile was not updated since the swine slew. And so that's pretty disappointing. And what is that? The stock pile is a stock pile of like equipment, like ventilators and different things? It is. It's called the strategic national stock pile. And it is a cash of supplies
Starting point is 01:57:58 that the government keeps to deploy strategically in situations like this. You have to come to a state of emergency in certain locations and then they'll deploy resources from the Strategic National Stock Pile. And so there's different equipment and items there. I'm not really sure what all is there, but when I started in infection prevention, it was when Ebola in Africa was a thing. Yep, yep. And so I learned about the stockpile at that point.
Starting point is 01:58:29 And I figured in 2014, 2015, they would have evaluated the stockpile and what equipment was in there and made sure it was sufficient for the Ebola response. Right. And maybe deployed some of that equipment to Africa to help out and replaced some of it as well. But we found out that that never happened and hopefully it's just conspiracy theory. We found out that a lot of the equipment in the stockpiles is expired. And it wasn't really replaced since 2009.
Starting point is 01:59:00 So it looks like, and what I think, I don't't know for sure I don't work for the government sure but what it looks like is that they replaced everything in 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu right and nothing was ever updated after that and so this is not usable that's frustrating I don't know I'm sure part of that is you know that hindsight thing where it's like you know when you're putting your budgets together There's so many different things that can go wrong and then maybe I guess just that got overlooked or just what or wasn't seen as a priority Probably more likely which I am guessing going forward a lot more priority will be placed on things exactly that because that's what I think too is Is this could this happen? I mean I guess this could happen two years from now and ten years from now And I mean is it is completely random right? I mean this happening now doesn't increase the likelihood that it's gonna Keep happening and this is gonna be the new normal right this is just an aberration
Starting point is 02:00:02 If this keeps happening I'm gonna go learn to be an expedition or something. If this keeps happening. What? Over the top. Yeah, it's always random, right? I hope it's not too normal. Yeah, and I just, I don't know, I think the government has been great about, you know, like I said, kind of spreading the word and shutting things down and doing those things.
Starting point is 02:00:23 But then there's also the personal protective equipment shortages. And that's totally not even anything to do with the government. So supply chain for hospitals works like if a hospital orders this much every month, that's basically your standing order and you always get that much. So every flu season you order a little bit more personal protective equipment because you also was coming and you need more masks and gowns and the supply manufacturers understand that they ramp up production and they give people what they need. Right. But this is so far above and beyond what our normal usage is and I don't
Starting point is 02:01:06 think our manufacturers will be able to keep up. So right now they're offering people you know what they normally use. But when we see this I mean New York I think had 50,000 patients who are positive today. And that's a huge increase in the protective equipment that we normal use as healthcare workers. So ramping up that production, even they turn their factories and work 24, 7, and they're never going to be able to pump out enough equipment. And that's why we're doing this now, right? Because that is, you know, initially, I will say, sometimes being a little too coldly logical, I got frustrated with part of the response because my thinking was, well,
Starting point is 02:01:47 even if a million people die, the economy has to go on, so it doesn't destroy the country for everyone. But then I started to wrap my head around the flatten the curve side of the argument. Yeah. And the shortage speaks to that, where that's, my understanding why it's so important now
Starting point is 02:02:01 to really hunker down, shelter in place, all those terms, because if we don't flatten this curve and people start to get sick at two, high of a rate, these hospitals literally won't be able to keep up with patients and they'll have to turn to sick away. I mean, that has happened in the past. Yeah, and it's currently happening in Italy. Oh my God, yeah. I hear today that it's happening in New York they're
Starting point is 02:02:25 calling it an apocalypse in New York. Oh my god. I mean that's in our own our own grounds and so it is. The flattened occur really just means that we need to make sure that the number of people infected at the same time is a manageable. So we want to draw out the timeframe, right? So instead of me going out and infecting 10 people all day long because I've been to Target and to Starbucks and to Ulta to buy moisturizer. I need that. I just got moisture. I love it. It looks great. Your skin looks awesome. I love it. It looks great. Your skin looks awesome.
Starting point is 02:03:03 Important things, right? So, we need to limit that, and then that will make sure that maybe it's just me who gets sick or maybe me and one of my family members versus me and 20 other people because I've been touching shopping carts and door handles and coughing on people all day long. And the healthcare systems are not designed to handle an influx of patients. I've seen really scary videos out of Italy where they've got people just lined up
Starting point is 02:03:34 and there's only enough room between them for the healthcare worker to just kind of do what they need to do and move to the next person. Wow. It's a really scary picture. So that is. We just, the flattening the curve is super important. That social distancing will help to do that. And I hope people will really embrace that
Starting point is 02:03:53 rather than just make it a current popular social media post. And the last thing about that kind of stuff is maybe not as much in the last few days, but early on with this outbreak, everyone kept comparing it to the flu. And everyone kept comparing it to like, well, we're not gonna shut down the whole country or the whole world because of the flu.
Starting point is 02:04:14 Why are we doing this? How is this current pandemic so much different than the flu? You know, the normal seasonal flu. Is it just, is it, is it the mortality rate as much higher? Is it because of the ventilate? Because of the upper respiratory tract stuff
Starting point is 02:04:28 where why is the response so much more intense than for any seasonal flu? It's all the things that we talked about, right? So flu, we have a seasonal vaccine that we get every year and we get a lot of people who are vaccinated for flu. Right. And that's super helpful, right? The vaccine's not great. We all know that. It's really only 40% effective. It's not great, but it helps.
Starting point is 02:04:53 It helps to reduce people who do get sick from going into the hospital. And then we also, we have, we've faced flu a lot of times in the past. So our immune systems are kind of amped to handle the flu every year. The flu is not as deadly. The flu is not as deadly for it. The flu is not as deadly. And the mortality rate of this is, you know, it's about 3%. 3% is what they're thinking.
Starting point is 02:05:22 I've heard World Health say that. I'm going to say one to three. Sure I'm gonna yeah, yeah, oh my god I'll save one with three sure sure. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot like point 1% so Right, okay. That's what I heard it's more deadly And so we have to be mindful of that that it we've never faced it before we have no immunity Our immune systems don't know how to react. We don't have it vaccine Um, and we have a really social world Right, so the so the shelter in place is not an overreaction. Do you think people do need to take that seriously?
Starting point is 02:05:50 I do I do really I take that seriously and I've been you know just my own mother I'm telling her to shelter in place and I've been keeping my kids away From her because I think she's at risk and right So I've been advising her in that and I do, I worry about that and I think that that would really help to flatten that curve for sure. Any idea and I know there's a lot of variables and you can't know a lot of these answers, but any general consensus maybe with you and your peers
Starting point is 02:06:19 of how long this is gonna continue, how long do you think we're gonna be hunkered down? I feel like we're looking at three to six months of waiting for it to happen and then when it happens and then we'll find it come into recovery is what I'm thinking. As far as the economy and life, I mean, I think we're looking at a good solid year 18 months for recovery for everything But guys that's kind of where it kind of been and you know Italy kind of started creeping up about Weeks ago and they're just kind of in In the top of that curve right now and then they'll start slowing down
Starting point is 02:07:01 I think do you think businesses will be open by the summer again? I mean the the current, like, I hope so. I mean, we're small business owners personally. Yeah. We have people that we want to keep employed and, you know, that's our livelihood. So not six plus months for no businesses being open.
Starting point is 02:07:17 I hope not. I hope not. I hope probably two or three months for no business is being open. Okay. And that social distancing, but I think definitely the response and healthcare and getting to that peak, I don't think we should go back into business and go back out into the world until after we've kind of peaked and we're coming down.
Starting point is 02:07:36 And we'll know that by the rates of new infections, is that how we'll know when the curve is going back down? Yeah, definitely. So right now, I'm thinking we're looking at kind of a three to four day doubling time. OK. In some areas like New York, I think that's much higher.
Starting point is 02:07:53 Yeah. In our area, we're less populated. So I think we're looking at a three to four day doubling time. And about 80% of the population is going to get infected with this. And they're going to be just fine. Right. And 20% of the population is going to get infected with this and they're going to be just fine. Right.
Starting point is 02:08:05 And, you know, 20% of people that get infected are, sorry, I said that wrong, 60 to 80% will get infected. 80% will be just fine. 20% will go to the hospital. Okay. And so once we see those doubling times kind of slow down, enter out, then we'll kind of be out of it. And is there like a range where like do you need to see them start to go down for a week,
Starting point is 02:08:28 two weeks before you can kind of like, okay, we can take this out of code red? So with influenza, we look at seasonal influenza, we look at the positivity rate. And so we have a really good surveillance system with public health set up for that. And they look at the amount of people who come to Get tested for flu and when you hit a 10% positivity rate, that's when you consider it an epidemic, a flu epidemic, when you hit One out of 10 people are testing positive for flu. Okay, okay. So when you hit 10% for two weeks, then you consider flu season. It's kind of ramping up.
Starting point is 02:09:05 OK. Usually it gets to about 20 to 30% every year of positivity. So three out of 10. And then it kind of lasts six or eight weeks. And then it starts tapering down again. And then once we have about three weeks out of below the 10% threshold that we consider us out of flu season. Okay. And the problem with using that model with COVID is that we don't have a good baseline for
Starting point is 02:09:35 testing people, right? Right, right. Like, a bunch of people who are totally fine and they're like, I need to get testing. And we have a bunch of people who are really sick and they're like, hunkering down and they don't want to go out and they don't want to be tested. Right. Stigma or whatever. So it's hard to get an accurate number, yeah. So it's hard to get that baseline and not like, you know, influenza like illness, positivity rate because you're not testing a solid baseline of people. So using a positivity rate is kind
Starting point is 02:10:03 of hard to judge that. So maybe at some point we can look at that, but right now it's really hard to say when you have an epidemic in your area versus a neck, which means it's kind of circulating normally. And more tests I think are coming though, correct? I heard that that more, I mean, they're working on getting more tests out and working on making them, I've heard anywhere from free to much more affordable. Yeah, so most of them, most interances and state labs are offering for free. Oh, and some centers and like if it's a public health kind of run center,
Starting point is 02:10:37 typically those are free. If it's a hospital-based center, sometimes there's a collection charge, but your insurance will wave it. Because we had a shortage here. I know at least last week here in Northern Idaho, it was almost impossible to get a test. But that's getting better, okay. Yeah, as far as I know, it's getting better. So you can go to the collection site and get tested if you have physician orders for you
Starting point is 02:11:01 to get tested. I think that there's going to be some government type setup, like a FEMA response maybe to set up some testing locations. And then the FDA has approved a ton of different testing methods. And so they're more and more available from commercial laboratories. And then there's some newer ones that are really short turn around time, which means you can get a result within hours versus days. Okay, that's gonna ask you. That's great that it's getting down to hours and not days. Yeah, so some of the limitations are that you know, they're shipping time to
Starting point is 02:11:39 get specimens to the testing laboratories. The laboratories have been backlogged with specimens, so they're just kind of in a queue waiting to get run. And there's just all kinds of problems with kind of rolling out the testing. So hopefully that will get better in the coming weeks. Is there anything from your area of expertise that you're frustrated that hasn't been in the media as much as it should be? I mean, with all the constant, you know, articles about COVID-19, is there anything you or you
Starting point is 02:12:09 in your peers like, I wish they would talk about this. There's, they've been doing a really good job on the media coverage. I just, I wish, you know, there's, I read a really great article about, it just feels weird right now. Like I would cover more about the psychological kind of aspect of this because I think a lot of us are
Starting point is 02:12:31 dealing with a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety. I think we're doing this like it's on article yesterday from Harvard Business Review about this grief that happens before because you're anticipating, I think you're gonna lose something, but you don't know what that is or what it's gonna look like when we come out on the other side. And so I do wish that we would kind of cover more of that psychological piece of it
Starting point is 02:12:56 because I think that's huge right now. And I think our fear and anxiety is playing a lot into this too. Yeah. The more people know and the better knowledge they have, the better we're gonna come out at the end. Right, right.
Starting point is 02:13:11 Well, I mean, yeah, uncertainty is so stressful. And yeah, we have so much of it, but I'm glad we have people like you that are working long hours to get answers so we can reduce that uncertainty. And I keep thinking of that, old saying, this too shall pass, where eventually we will be out of this. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:13:30 I haven't seen this talked about, and then I won't keep you any, I know you get busy, but with all the shelter and place orders, are you or any of your peers worried that we could see a massive spike in injuries related to masturbation right now? I try to keep it serious for so long. I had to sleep here.
Starting point is 02:13:49 I have heard from the obstetricians that I work but then I'm really sure of all there's gonna be a giant baby boom in nine months. I don't know about injuries from masturbation but definitely baby boom we're expecting. I hope people stay safe out there. When this is all over, Joe and I want to introduce flattening the curve as a new popular euphemism
Starting point is 02:14:10 for masturbation. Hopefully make light of it down the road. Well, I don't want to keep you, I mean, I feel bad where you've stayed with us so long already and I know you got to be tired. I mean, that he said you're working long hours, you have a business also in addition to all this. My husband runs the business, I don't.
Starting point is 02:14:29 I told Joe earlier, I said, I've been hitting the wine and the sweatpants a lot lately. Oh, well that's good. I'm glad you let me know about the video aspect of this. So that I can at least look presentable. Oh, you know, no, yeah. Yeah, very, very presentable. And you're younger than me, by the way.
Starting point is 02:14:45 I didn't want to say it earlier, but when you threw out the high school for SARS, I was already out of college. So. Oh, there you go. Okay. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Amy, for taking the time to talk to us.
Starting point is 02:14:57 You know, I mean, I'm so glad I got to hear from you. You know, a lot of the things I looked into I was like, okay, so that was correct, so that was nice. And then the thing I keep, it's human nature to want answers. And I just keep looking and there really isn't answers right now to a lot of this. But it was weirdly comforting to hear that from you, to hear that you're also experiencing that
Starting point is 02:15:23 and you and your peers are like, yeah, we want answers too, but there are just some of them just aren't there yet. And we gotta just wait this out. Yeah, and it's nice people are putting stuff out there as soon as they know and adding to the literature, but it's not super powerful. So that makes it hard to really rely upon when you don't have those solid answers.
Starting point is 02:15:44 So the answers that we're used to having that we can rely upon and make decisions with, they're a lot weaker. So we'll get there, but it's just going to be a little bit. Where should people go? That's the last thing. I know I already said last thing, but where should people look? What do you think is a great source of information? Or a few if you have, could be, could be website, could be a journal,
Starting point is 02:16:05 because it's so tricky because everybody's reporting on it. Yeah, definitely. So the Lancet is a journal, and they have a lot of really great, free COVID-19 resources on the Lancet. And then, Not the L-A-N-C-E-T, right? Correct, yeah.
Starting point is 02:16:22 And then CDC also, they're always gold. They're a little bit slower to release stuff, but it's always solid when they put it out. Okay. I love University of Nebraska. Oh. They've got a lot of great stuff. And Emory, down in Atlanta, Georgia, they've got a lot of really good stuff for infectious disease.
Starting point is 02:16:43 Oh, great. So those are kind of my go-to resources And those are public those are those are those are all pretty public. Yeah Some of them may be a little bit higher level thinking our guidance But you don't need you don't need to subscribe to those universities. Okay, great No, and the Lancet is all free with the COVID section. Oh great great. Yeah, it's awesome the land set is all free with the COVID section. Oh, great, great, great. It's awesome.
Starting point is 02:17:05 Yeah, I like it. Thank you, Amy Ward. And again, this is Amy Ward, MSRNCIC, Masters in Infection Prevention at NEPIDBiology, Registered Nurse, Board Certified in Infection Prevention and Control, not some nice person that we just met on the street. She works in this, she knows.
Starting point is 02:17:21 And I thank you again so much for letting us spread some good information out there Yeah, thanks for having me you guys. I appreciate it. Thank you. Let me say stay safe You two the things. Okay, bye. Bye So fun get an interview on here. Thanks to thanks to Reverend Dr. Joe Paisley for lining that up I hope you found that interview helpful What I took away mostly is that we're dealing with mostly the unknown Maybe this current pandemic will quickly fade away in the next few weeks or months. Maybe we'll mutate into a less contagious form, less lethal form. It'll die down.
Starting point is 02:17:52 And then we can criticize our various governments for overreacting and being alarmist and needlessly sacrificing our economies to fear. Or maybe it really is as bad as it appears to some to be, you know, currently, maybe it's mortality rate is similar to that of the Spanish flu. Maybe it mutates into something worse, our hospitals become a little run around the world like what has happened recently in Italy, more in Italy in a bit, and then we're criticizing our governments for not doing enough, for not doing more. Nobody fucking knows what the best thing to do is right now, not truly. That's the sad truth.
Starting point is 02:18:25 No one knows exactly what economic impact all these shutdowns are going to have. No one really knows exactly how much the US $2 trillion stimulus package is going to help. No one knows how many will die because no one fully understands exactly how this little decade virus behaves. We don't know for sure how contagious it is. We don't know for sure how lethal it is. We don't know. I know that Amy laughed. We don't know for sure how lethal it is. We just, we don't know.
Starting point is 02:18:45 I know that Amy laughed at my masturbation joke. That's, that made me happy. I took that away from that interview. That feels good. I also know that when all this is over, I'm really gonna try and self flattening the curve as a new masturbation euphemism. You going anywhere this weekend?
Starting point is 02:18:57 Nah, now I'm probably gonna shelter in place. Just kinda flatten the curve a few times. You get it. I also know drinking bleach doesn't help. I know that for sure. Let's talk about something I know for sure a little bit more. Let's lighten things up a bit more by looking at those who think drinking some miracle, mineral solution,
Starting point is 02:19:14 aka bleach, can knock out a virus lickety split and today's idiots of the internet. On the secret suck, the weekly Patreon counterpart time suck, back in July 18th, 2019, episode 73, I talked about a wackadoodle named Jim Humble and his Genesis 2 church of health and healing. And I learned that Jim told his followers that they didn't need vaccinations, they didn't go to the doctor, they didn't need a lot of medicine, because Jim's church has his own doctors, kind of, but not really. They have ministers of health with a train in house, not doctors trained by other not doctors, who then claim to be types
Starting point is 02:19:57 of doctors. Super fun. From their own webpage, ministers of health are trained in seminars, or from our online course, the training is very thorough and includes doing and using all the sacraments protocols on oneself. Each student learns all the technical data of why MMS works and sacraments for most diseases of mankind. Finally, there is an exam to test your mental proficiency on the G2 sacraments. And what are these sacraments? The sacraments are sodium chloride, hydrochloric acid, calcium hypochlorite, calcium benetite clay, dimethyl sulfoxide, some crazy word that's like a fancy kind of dirt, dimatious earth, zinc oxide, the basic ingredients of
Starting point is 02:20:39 MMS, the miracle, the miracle, mineral solution. And according to Jim's website last year in 1996, while prospecting for gold in South America, he discovered what has come to be known as MMS, a simple health formula that cured malaria. In the years that followed, he worked to further improve that formula, eventually a missionary group invited him to Africa, where he successfully treated over 5,000 malaria cases
Starting point is 02:21:03 and victims of other diseases. Since that time, hundreds of thousands of people where he successfully treated over five thousand malaria cases and victims of other diseases. Since that time, hundreds of thousands of people have used MMS to recover their health from a wide range of diseases. And that's not true. Did I mention that Jim has zero medical education, like absolutely none. What he claims to have found to cure for malaria, the CDC and who, every other legitimate health and disease study and prevention organizations
Starting point is 02:21:25 in the fucking world will tell you there is no cure for malaria. Jim not so humble humble will tell you that he knocked out malaria back in 96. You know, no big whoops. Jim is recently distanced himself from pushing MMS probably because the FDA told him to not get the fuck off or he's going to get in a lot of trouble. Probably, you know, you should back off because you could go to jail for encouraging people to drink something that can kill them, something that has killed people. The FDA has sent out warnings about MMA many times. Warned people that serious harm will result from drinking miracle mineral solution because it contains industrial strength bleach.
Starting point is 02:22:00 Turns out drinking industrial strength bleach is very bad for you. age, turns out drinking industrial strength bleach is very bad for you. But while Jim may have slowed down pushing MMS others recently in the last few weeks, a lot of QAnon believers have been pushing MMS as a cure for HIV, malaria, autism, and of course now COVID-19. And please do not believe them. It doesn't work on fucking anything. If it worked, we'd always drink in it, and MMS manufacturers will be rolling in MMS money,
Starting point is 02:22:28 but they're not because it doesn't. Not one clinical study has been done to prove this shit works. For the same reason, no studies have been done to see a punch in yourself in the dick, cures blindness. It's fucking insane. It's nonsense. It's gibberish. Any biochemist who knows anything about how bleach interacts with pathogens knows
Starting point is 02:22:46 that the claims of people like Wacadoodle, Jim Humble are dangerous and preposterous. MMS defenders, here all this, laugh it off. They'll just think that I'm another moron, fallen for the many lives of big pharma. MMS believers think the entire worldwide Western medical community is in on one giant scam to keep real treatments and real cures away from you so they can line their pockets with expensive FDA approved bullshit treatments. And do I think a group of people would lie to you and take advantage of the sick and the dying and charge lots of money for shit that doesn't really cure anything to just line their pockets? Yeah, I think that stuff happens for sure. I just don't think that group is big
Starting point is 02:23:23 pharma. I think wacky little selling shit like MMS or doing that. I think their little groups are those groups. I do think certain medical companies within big pharma are greedy to an evil level. I do think some of them profit off of the dying in ways that are truly despicable. Some day I'd like to do a suck on big pharma to talk about some of that evil profiteering, but I don't think big farm is part of one giant international, horrific conspiracy. Why numbers? I don't think literally millions of doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, pharmacists, medical
Starting point is 02:23:53 researchers, et cetera, around the world from every single country on earth can all keep the same evil secret that all their medicine is nonsense. And all you really need is MMS. I don't think they can teach some of the brightest minds in the world year after year, generation after generation, a bunch of gobbledygook gibberish, keep them from doing the correct research that reveals some big lie that we don't need all these drug cocktails. We don't need vaccines. We don't need antiviral medications or antibiotics.
Starting point is 02:24:21 All we need to do is drink a few cups, something that is mostly bleach. I don't believe that because I'm mostly a rational human being who is employing critical thinking skills when it comes to this issue. And now, in QAnon chat rooms and on Reddit and elsewhere, MMS is being pushed as a way to both prevent becoming infected with COVID-19 and also as a way to easily heal yourself if you get it. To get a feel for how supporters feel about MMS in general, let's look at the comment section below a video titled MMS, the Miracle Cure, published by Canada CBC Broadcasting Network back in 2016. For US listeners, the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a PBS NPR equivalent.
Starting point is 02:25:02 And they illustrate how harmful this shit is to drink in a 20-minute long exposé. At one point, a woman named Linda talks about nearly dying from drinking it, and then user C Silver Posts, Linda should learn about proper doses of MMS. It works for me, and then user left field replies, and me, and hundreds of thousands of others around the world. That's why they're trying to make it illegal, just like medicinal cannabis. Anything that works is being outlawed. Here do we go. Anything that works is being outlawed.
Starting point is 02:25:33 What a paranoid mentality. Yeah, the world leaders have subordinates running to their office, it's gonna present it. It works. We cure cancer, the researchers did it, they cured it. Outlawed, you know the rules. Anything that works is outlawed. Just two days ago, user Ian Beninger leaves some sarcasm in this thread posting.
Starting point is 02:25:52 Yeah, just imagine if the whole world took MMS, just like you, we wouldn't even be in this pandemic, right? Yeah, exactly. This is fucking complete nonsense. Left field replies to Ian with the benefit that it's pathogen selective, it won't harm healthy cells. Big pharma always comes with debilitating side effects while safe and effective fixes are suppressed.
Starting point is 02:26:14 Ian posts, you should stop calling it pathogen selective. Left field comes back with it is pathogen selective. Look up the charge, learn a little bio physics. And then Ian replies with, uh, just as past Thursday, I have a bachelor of science and biology have taken plenty of physics, chemistry, biology, bacteriology, yes, even biofacus classes. Lots of things carry charges, including a lot of the food we eat. The idea that any of those charges could be pathogen selective is nonsense. Left field throws a back and ending the thread with, having a batch of signs to your e-mines, Jack,
Starting point is 02:26:49 if you haven't studied this molecule, you're a time waste or Ian, all you have to do is look it up, end of conversation. Jesus Christ. I imagine Ian reading that last comment and just, just exhaling deeply, putting his head in his hands, mumbling something like, why don't I even find the way
Starting point is 02:27:04 to my time? Why don't I even find the way's my time? Why don't you even try to help these idiots? Just let them drink their bleach. The planet would be better off without them. I don't know. Maybe I'm projecting my thoughts into Ian there. I just hate the mentality of people like left field. Having the bachelors of science doesn't mean Jack. Not having a degree in something doesn't mean you're wrong. Doesn't mean you're an idiot. Doesn't mean you're ignorant, but not respecting someone else's formal education in a specific area thinking that it doesn't mean Jack, that does make you ignorant. It makes you ignorant to the value of education. I noticed this over and over with Wacadoodles, they don't respect education. Why?
Starting point is 02:27:42 Because to put it bluntly, they don't know what they don't know. They're so fucking ignorant and sometimes just so fucking dumb. They're intellectually incapable of understanding why education is valuable. It's maddening. User ATI insider doesn't like a person saying how parents who make their children drink MMS instead of getting real medicine, she'd have their kids taken away posting and to the parent that wants children taken away from their parents, mind your own business. Uh, no, uh, no, we won't. ATI, uh, people like that, their kids should be taken away.
Starting point is 02:28:16 You want to become a dumb fuck who insists on drinking bleach? Fine. Become another Darwin award winner. You stubborn moron, but you want to make your kids drink it. Fuck you. You unfit mess of a parent. That's abuse. Daria Liyalov posts, I'm taking it right now, just ordered from the church.
Starting point is 02:28:34 Hope to get rid of harmful bacteria in my gut. Amy Lou replies, what harmful bacteria? There are strains of bacteria that belong in your gut. They help you digest food. Exactly. Darn he is trying to bleach tummy ache away. I don't think that's going to go well. Now let's look at comments from something more recent.
Starting point is 02:28:53 User David Gare just uploaded a video two weeks ago called MMS Chloride Dioxide or I'm sorry, MMS Chlorine Chlorine Dioxide kills coronavirus. User Rev M asked a very legitimate question posting, how do you know it works? Robert Wooper, that's like a weird last name that I don't trust, WWE R. Robert Wooper answers with, it kills the flu. Oh, thank you.
Starting point is 02:29:17 Now I'll drink bleach. I'll drink it because some Jack has named Robert Wooper, someone who doesn't list any qualifications, someone who just says, it kills a flu. All right, I'll just drink it because he says it does. No links to clinical trials. No links to any studies. Nothing.
Starting point is 02:29:31 Just someone going because it does work. I got to him. Reverend Rev. M replies back to Robert with, yeah, I know, but I was hoping for info from someone who was diagnosed positive and had used MMS to solve the problem. And then Robert wooer then replies with, there is a lady and her son untested but had symptoms and took MMS and it cleared it in two days. This was reported on the Genesis 2 radio program.
Starting point is 02:29:55 Fuck! These people are so fucking dumb and it is painful to read this shit. I know it work because lady on radio shows have son who have sniffle fever, drink it and have bleach, then good. So works, rest case. Most people who get it, you know, like a virus like this, they do get better in a few days with no treatment, right? Most, a lot of people don't even show symptoms at all. God damn it. This person's like, they're not even test. This is the kind of evidence people who believe in this kind of shit point to. I don't think they even know how clinical trials work.
Starting point is 02:30:34 I don't think this person post is what even know what a control group is. My friend's sick one time and he drink bleach get better. Bleach cure. I have another friend. He gets sick, took medicine. Still sick. So medicine bad, bleach good, wake up, sheeple. Last couple comments. January 29th, a channel called The Ring of Fire, posted video called QAnon tells followers to drink bleach to fight coronavirus. Top comment left by user Iris who posts, this is the best best conspiracy theory yet their own ignorance will kill them.
Starting point is 02:31:07 I laughed so hard when I first read that and you know what? Maybe this makes me a terrible person, but sometimes when people are just so willfully stubbornly ignorant, I just think, yeah, maybe it's best if they just weed themselves out of the gene pool. I mean, do we really want them breeding? I don't. User Sincin leaves the next comment, quote, he won my favorite comics, Ron White posting, you can't fix stupid. It's fucking so true. I feel like sometimes you know, some people, they're just, they double down so hard, they reach an age, they just refuse to listen to reason. I'm like, why are you even fucking here?
Starting point is 02:31:40 All right. Why? And people like, Hey, you know, that's mean. Come on, let them live their lives. Now, because it doesn't just affect them. They're fucking breed and they make more stupid people. And then those people fuck things up for the rest of us and they get people killed by hurting your hurting herd immunity and so many other things. Oh my god. User lazy sloths cracks me up, posting the burning in your stomach is an indication that the MMS solution is working. Yeah, yeah, just keep drinking more. Jerome Pringle post drinking a deadly cocktail of chemicals to fight a deadly virus, smart. And I'll leave with the flying Welshman's comments.
Starting point is 02:32:13 These are the same people who think vaccines cause autism, exactly, exactly. I wish I would have thought to ask Amy, what about this? I'm guessing she would have just rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh or just been confused just to wait what? Thanks for being better than this time suckers. I know that during scary times, it can be easy to feel desperate. The desperate times can call for desperate measures. But I'm also guessing that a lot of you just know that there's no magical cure for COVID-19.
Starting point is 02:32:40 Right? It just doesn't make sense for anyone to hide a known cure from you. Pushing shit like MMS is just medically dumb. It just means that you're a con artist or both. It's not going to help. There's no, you know, miracle cure out there that will help. It's all snake oil. Please don't fall for it. Don't listen to the gym humbles of the world. Don't listen to the Jordan Saithers, Jordan popular YouTuber. We also talked about Reese and the secret suck who also recently told his followers to drink MMS to cure COVID-19. Jordan, like Jim, no medical education. None of these fucking pieces of shit are doctors. None of them are epidemiologists. They're just
Starting point is 02:33:14 con artists. Tellin lies to make money. But there was ever a time to trust your doctor. This is that time. Jordan tweeted that there is evidence that MMS can cure COVID-19. There is not. He told his followers to MMS to shut out everything. He will not help. It can very likely cause severe vomiting, diarrhea, life-threatening, low blood pressure, and cause liver failure. It can kill you. It has killed people.
Starting point is 02:33:38 Don't take a so-called cure that is worse than the disease. Don't be another idiot of the internet. It is an idiot to that, get rid of that. The longer I go into this, the more I hate these con artists. It's just, fuck, I wish the coronavirus could just only kill them. Okay, let's wrap this up. Why are we practicing social distancing? Why is the stock market in the US crashing? Why are many international markets crashing?
Starting point is 02:34:04 Why are businesses closed? Why are needed jobs going away? Why is the stock market in the US crashing? Why are many international markets crashing? Why are businesses closed? Why are needed jobs going away? Why is unemployment skyrocketing? Why are we very likely heading into an economic recession? Possible depression? Why are we risking a surge in homelessness that not even a $2 trillion stimulus package is going to stop? Because we don't want another Spanish flu.
Starting point is 02:34:22 We don't want millions dead. That's one reason. And the other reason that justifies a short-term closure of many businesses in my mind is we don't want our hospitals overrun with too many people getting sick too fast. That is the most valid reason, in my opinion, for shelter-in-place measures. We're not shutting down the economy here in the US
Starting point is 02:34:40 because we just can't risk a lot of people dying of COVID-19. We can risk that actually, and we should, and I hate all the virtue signaling that's going on by some who think that we should just all stay at home for months on end, you know, so that, you know, somebody's grandparents won't die. I love my grandparents so much. Don't want them to die. But I'm also not a fucking child.
Starting point is 02:34:59 I also understand that risking worldwide economic devastation to lower the risk of Nana and Papa Dine is incredibly selfish and childish. That's not why we're hunkering down. It's not to save a few elderly people. We're hunkering down because the US and much of the world doesn't have enough doctors, ventilators, ICU hospital beds to handle everyone getting sick at the same time. If we can spread out the death,
Starting point is 02:35:21 we can avoid a lot of extra unnecessary death. We won't have more doctors riding letters like Dr. Roy Gris did back in 1918 outside of Boston as a camp devence. We don't want hospitals to be overrun like in Italy where doctors have to choose who to try and save, choose who to turn away. I recorded this on Friday, March 27th, Friday morning, Italy had over 80,000 cases, over 8,000 deaths, scarier the mortality rate was speculated to be as high as 7.2%. Versus 2.3% in China, 7.2 would make the virus far more lethal
Starting point is 02:35:55 than the Spanish flu. Some Italian hospitals are on the brink of collapse as I record this. If too many doctors get sick, not only can they not treat additional COVID-19 patients, they can't treat anyone. People will die in ER rooms because they felt on the stairs, started bleeding internally because they had heart attacks because doctors won't be able to save them because the
Starting point is 02:36:14 doctors are too sick and the doctors are dealing with the flood of COVID-19 patients. Kids could die of cancer, other ailments because medical staff are not available to treat them because there's only so many people to go around. Some Italian patients have been transferred to Germany due to critical shortages of ventilators and supplies. Spain is struggling, recorded as deadliest day yet on Thursday the 26th with 769 COVID-19 deaths in just 24 hour period. In New York City, the largest hotspot in the US 84 COVID-19 patients died on Thursday, the 26th, as wave after wave of critically ill people flooded intensive care units, threatened to overwhelm the healthcare system.
Starting point is 02:36:52 Columbia NYU Medical School said they will allow medical students to graduate early to join the fight against COVID-19 as hospitalization surged by 40%. What if there was another 40% bump because we didn't try to flatten the curve? There's only so many beds, only so many doctors. That's why we want to flatten the curve. That's why we want to shelter in place. That's why we want to practice social distancing. Right now it's less about eliminating the spread of the virus.
Starting point is 02:37:17 It's more about slowing it to fuck down. It took me a long time to get my head around this, but I have now and I'm like, okay, I get it. I know we can't shut down forever but I get why we got to shut down for a little while. Right before recording this on Friday, despite very little testing being done so far because most nations don't have COVID-19 tests readily available because they didn't have it available when the pandemic hit and they're still on enough in most places. There was 574,834 confirmed cases in the world. 26,367 deaths, both numbers are likely in reality to be much higher.
Starting point is 02:37:51 Does the flu kill more in effect more every flu season? Yes, the CDC estimates that as a mid-march between 29,000, 59,000 have died due to influenza illnesses. During the 2017-2018 season, 61,000000 died worldwide more than COVID so far, at least the known deaths, but we're just getting started. This appears to be much more lethal than the seasonal flu. The seasonal flu kills about 1.1% of those in fact, compared again to anywhere from one to 3% to who the fuck knows percent of people with COVID-19. Now, I'm going to stop now.
Starting point is 02:38:25 Information is changing so fast. By the time you hear this new stats will make any current numbers I give irrelevant, just know that COVID-19 is not just another seasonal flu. I've looked into this harder than I've looked at any other topic. I believe that with every fiber of my being, it might not be any worse than the seasonal flu when it's all said and done, but we just don't know that. And like Amy said, many of us might look back at this as an alarmist over reaction, or it could be a second wave-spanaged flu. And if that happens, we won't be able to stop it, and we're going to
Starting point is 02:38:56 look back and think, why the fuck didn't we do so much more? We can't kill this novel unpredictable virus. We won't be able to kill it in six months. If you get it just gonna have to hope it doesn't mess you up too bad if it gets bad You're gonna have to hope there's an available ventilator for you an available hospital bed Even if there is there won't be a lot your doctor can do because viruses are the fucking worst Last thing While you're practicing some social distancing to flatten the curve while your shelter in place Maybe also don't do really stupid shit. It's gonna send you to an already overcrowded hospital Ignore Luciferina when she tells you to stick something new up your ass.
Starting point is 02:39:29 That's literally the last thing the world's exhausted ER doctors need right now. They have to fish a light bulb or a Tonka truck out of your butthole. Enjoy your home time but not that much. Tone it down. What's the Tiger King? Murder mayhem and madness on Netflix. He caught up on some shows. Holy shit. Is that one crazy? And also know that after all these numbers, I threw out you, even with the Spanish flu, even that devastating pandemic, the overwhelming majority of meat sacks did survive. Life got better.
Starting point is 02:39:54 The roaring 20s hit, the economy picked way up. Things got pretty good, pretty quick. You know, this two shall pass. As I said at the beginning, fuck you, COVID-19, this two shall pass. The overwhelming majority of us will get through this time now for top five takeaways. Time, shock, top five takeaways. Number one, viruses are hard to kill because they're not really alive. They're little mayhem and
Starting point is 02:40:20 death machines. They want to invite, invade your cells and replicate. And the COVID-19 virus wants to keep replicating and tell it overwhelms your immune system and shuts down your lungs. Their little assholes. Number two, the Spanish flu has nothing to do with Spain. Likely started in Kansas. You'll soy the Kansas. No soy espanola, a soyling jahawk.
Starting point is 02:40:40 Number three, wash your hands. You can get COVID-19 by touching a service or object that has the virus on it and then by touching your nose, mouth, eyes, vagina butthole. This is not to be thought to be the main way the virus spreads, especially butthole. I can't find any info on that specifically. But in all seriousness, it seems to spread mostly
Starting point is 02:40:57 through the air via sneezing and coffee. That's why I want to keep six feet away from people. It seems to be able to live for up to three hours in the air on surfaces like cardboard, it can live for about 24 hours. Other surfaces like steel. It can live for about three days. Number four, don't drink MMS, AKA mineral, uh, miracle mineral solution, AKA industrial bleach to try and cure COVID-19 or anything else. The only thing this cures if you drink enough of it is stupidity by killing you. And number five, new information, you know, for this suck, but not really new in life, but bleach won't help, but there are ways to keep your immune system in tiptoff shape.
Starting point is 02:41:31 It's healthy as it can be. So you have the most T cells and other little immunity helpers available to fight off COVID-19. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, whole grains. Don't live on just mountain-doin ding-dongs full of empty sugary high-process calories that help you get diabetes, but don't have important vitamins and minerals. Get at least 30 minutes of exercise, most days of the week, ideally three to five, get that heart rate up, get enough sleep, try for at least six hours a night, if not seven or eight, wash your hands diligently, keep your weight healthy, don't drink too much alcohol, a
Starting point is 02:42:02 glass or two a day is fine for most people. A half rack every afternoon, probably not good. It dehydrates you, taxes your liver, fills you full of more empty calories, and don't smoke. Extra important with COVID-19 to keep those lungs healthy. It's an upper respiratory tract infection. A pack of marbles a day is not keeping that tract in tip-top shape. Take a good multivitimate. And if you're hunkered down inside, take extra vitamin D that you're not getting from the sun.
Starting point is 02:42:30 Don't add depression to everything else you're dealing with. Also mental health hotlines are popping up around the world to deal with the psychological effects of living in such uncertain times. And we're social creatures, having that taken away from us. New York just launched one, one, eight, four, four, eight, six, three, nine, three, one, four, right?
Starting point is 02:42:50 You can call that at any time. There's others out there in many states and nations, Google what's available in your state or city or country to get the help you need right now, MedSax. There's a lot of different things. There's, you know, figure out how to use the stimulus to benefit that. There's hotlines for so many different things
Starting point is 02:43:06 all over the world right now. It is nice to see a lot of people rise into the occasion and doing a lot of great things to help everyone in need. So if you're feeling trapped inside, your computer, your phone, there's your friends, use them to find important resources, not just to find pictures that help you flatten your own personal curves.
Starting point is 02:43:24 Hail fucking Nimrod. COVID-19, the Spanish flu sucked as much as I can suck them. Oh my God. I hope you enjoyed the episode. We won't be doing many like this. Thank God because this shit hurts my brain. But I am so glad that I learned a lot of stuff and I hope I was able to help a lot of you learn some stuff. I needed this one this week just to get my head around
Starting point is 02:43:50 some stuff. Big thanks again to Amy Ward for her help. Also big thanks to Nurse Amy Jean for adding additional medical know-how to my research. Thanks to the time stock team, Queen of the Suck Lindsey Commons, high priestess of the Suck Harmony Valley Camp, special thanks to Reverend doctor
Starting point is 02:44:05 Joe Paisley for additional help with this one as well The bit of liquor app design crew Logan and Kate a spicy cleverer and bad magic merch.com Script keeper Zach flannery busy researching future trim future true crime sucks my god at the moment my brand is much More than normal Thanks to the all-seeing eyes of the cult, helping Liz Hernandez run the cult of the Curious Facebook group. Thank you, Liz.
Starting point is 02:44:31 It's needed very much right now. Appreciate that very, very much. There's never been a better time to jump in and take advantage of our online community. You gotta practice social distancing, but you can socialize virtually. The cult of the Curious Private Facebook group, link in the episode description,
Starting point is 02:44:46 link to Discord via the TimeSuck app. Next week, a big, discrap distraction. I really can't, my God, my brain is everywhere right now. This, I will say, just before I move on, I have never had such a hard time focusing as I've had the last two weeks. I've never been so fucking glued to my phone. The news changes so constantly,
Starting point is 02:45:04 it's making me feel crazy. Ah, so much information we're being bombarded with right now. Next week we're gonna have a nice distraction from it all. Ah, a sex suck. The space that's on Patreon wanted me to suck the female ejaculation, squirting. I will, but we'll also talk about a lot of other sexual things,
Starting point is 02:45:22 like porn, the pros and cons, of looking at pictures and videos of strangers while they're naked and Possibly engaging in a wide range of sexual activities. Is that healthy? Not healthy who wins who loses? What kinds of sex are people having? What kinds of sex do people have? Luciferina is gonna love next week's suck. Maybe more than any other. No, it's gonna be very oof the oof the puttin' thing and ding and hosey wupin' and the tuggin'. We're going to suck some fuck and it's going to be a great
Starting point is 02:45:48 distraction. And, you know, if you're home with your lover, great time, maybe to try out some new stuff, but again, not too much. Don't get that ER, Dr. Holt Flustered with your talk of truck. But I think it's going to be fun. So listen to our watch next week and listen right now as we check in with this week's time sucker updates. First update from a rightfully concerned super sucker, John Filano. Chameen was a PSA regarding the mouth to vagina to unborn baby CPR that we talked about in the nation of Yahweh suck. John Wright's Haydann loved the show but wanted to quickly address a point in the time
Starting point is 02:46:27 sucker update from last week. You mentioned the pussy blower and I also mentioned what's called the beaver call. Just wanted to let you know and potential listeners know not to do this. Blowing into a vagina can actually cause an embolism. I know it's a little silly, but figured it might be something to let people know. Just in case some idiots actually try this. Yes, thank you, John. That's true. It is actually very dangerous. This is from Healthline.com, an air embolism, also called a gas embolism, occurs when one or more air bubbles enters a vein or an artery and blocks it. When an air
Starting point is 02:47:00 bubble enters a vein, it's called a venuous air embolism. When an air bubble enters an artery, it's called an arterial air embolism. These air bubbles can travel to your heart, brain, lungs, cause a heart attack stroke, a respiratory failure. Air embolisms are rather rare. And it lists blowing into the vagina as a rare cause of embolism. Saying in rare instances, blowing air into the vagina during oral sex can cause an air embolism. In this case, the air embolism can occur if there's a tear or injury in the vagina or uterus, the risk is higher in pregnant women who may have a tear in their placenta.
Starting point is 02:47:35 So especially, rescue, if you're trying to save that little baby in there, you know, this, let you know his baby's choking. Please have me don't disregard it. I can't breathe in there. I'm mom didn't cheer steak. Please have me. I'm pleased to have him and don't disregard it. I'll come breathe in there. I'm mom didn't cheer steak, please have me in this. I don't love a John or a Udru situation.
Starting point is 02:47:49 So just know, you know, you shouldn't do that. You know, just like you don't want to stick new untested stuff in your butt, you also don't want to blow into vagina's right now. Doctors have enough to deal with without vaginal embolism. Thank you, John. We actually got quite a few of messages regarding that.
Starting point is 02:48:05 Now for a cute and disturbing message from Top shelf, Meet Sack, Heather, I'm gonna guess, Leon Hart. Heather writes, most supreme Suck Master Dan, I wanted to share a funny moment with my middle school son. We were bombing to school one morning, that Dan Ziggs saw a mother.
Starting point is 02:48:22 Mother, little, little, little, little. Yeah, that sounds good. Comes on a naturally, I respond out loud with Zapples' Mother. And then I proceed to explain very carefully mind you about the origin of said joke. I obviously left out the neckfucking. Fast forward several weeks to the start of our homeschooling journey and my son now only refers to me as Mother in the accent and everything. I'm proud and horrified at the same time.
Starting point is 02:48:46 Thank you so much for providing this tiny piece of normal during this otherwise chaotic time. Keep on keeping on suck master, praiseable jangles and triple him. Oh, well, thank you for sharing the Heather cracks me up and you sound like a great model. Hope you can keep laughing right now. Now for a Dillinger related message from final Ohio sucker, Ben Fisher, Ben writes, Dear Sir Moshmouth sucks a lot. Lord of mispronunciation. Yeah, I feel so true right now. I'm out of those dead right now.
Starting point is 02:49:12 While sitting here in Ohio, preparing to listen to the John Dillinger suck, I'm messaging my coworker Dave, whom I recruited to the cult and has since become a space lizard. We are both home, complying with the governor's state home order, somewhat hurtful to be called non-essential but any who. He has started the episode before me, and I mentioned how Dillinger has some ties to my hometown, a few minutes into listening. I get a message from Dave, spoiler alert, your town is mentioned. Not sure if there are any other suckers from Lima, Ohio, but we are used to everyone mispronouncing our town. Here in Ohio, we have a few towns that are named after already known cities and places,
Starting point is 02:49:45 but horribly mispronounced. For example, Russia, Ohio is pronounced Rushi, and Versailles is pronounced Versailles. You're in good company. Pierce Bronson made the same Lyme mistake in the movie Thomas Crown Affair. I only know this because the story made the local EV News back in 99 when the movie came out. Pretty sure this flood is why he was ousted, his role as James Bond. So not really a much malsymptom. Just thought I would call you out on the mispronunciation because no one else probably will. Nobody gives a shit
Starting point is 02:50:14 about Lyma. Keep doing what you do. Appreciate it now more during the quarantine than ever. Praiseable jangles. Ben. Yes, thank you. But my wife is from Parma Heights, suburb of Cleveland. Lindsay, she found out I messed up. She's like, yes, Limea. American Towns, man, all these French and Spanish words that Americans fucking butcher, and now pronunciation is so hard to figure out, because you never know if it's the, you know, the pronunciation native to the original language, or if it's some Americanized version. Thank you for continuing to listen. Hope you're doing all right with the locked in.
Starting point is 02:50:44 You know, you're an essential listen. Hope you're doing all right with the locked in. You know, you're an essential listener. That's what I think. So keep listening. Last message now from awesome time sucker and fantastic mother. Sarah Bedwell, Sarah writes, Dear Master of Time sucker.
Starting point is 02:50:58 This has been a message in the making in my mind for the past three weeks. I guess I'll start with the backstory. My husband always talked about some damn podcast he listens to I didn't care. I thought podcasts were boring and nerdy till one day he messaged me and told me about a new podcast he had listened, started listening to, scared to death. He'd asked me if I ever heard of the union house I hadn't so he told me to look it up. I did.
Starting point is 02:51:19 It didn't scare me like it did him. He said I needed to hear the story from you. We listened to scared to death that night and I was hooked. We listened to Scared of Death that night, and I was hooked. We listened to Scared of Death all the time now together on a creep. He's a peep. He mentioned to me that you were coming to St. Louis right around his birthday, and he asked for tickets.
Starting point is 02:51:35 Of course, being the wonderful wife that I am, I bought them, so we saw you back in February, and yes, we have a picture with you. He was so giddy that night, and he kept telling me, if he does any of the characters, you're gonna be like, what the fuck? Of course you did. And of course, I was like, what the fuck? The next day I decided to give time suck a shot and went in order from episode one to eight. I wasn't sold yet. Excuse me, but I thought it was pretty awesome that
Starting point is 02:51:56 I was learning things. So I decided to skip around the topics that interested me. I have now listened to 55 episodes in three weeks. I've been a stay at home mom for the past 11 years. I now work for Amazon in the warehouse. Time sucks seriously gets me through my day. I'm constantly laughing. I'm pretty sure my coworkers think I'm nutty. Chicken Joe is by far my favorite. Oh, I love that.
Starting point is 02:52:14 Bok, bock, bock, bock, bock. I had originally taken notes on each of the episodes of things I wanted to mention. However, being a stoner who has three kids, you can probably imagine I've forgotten them. I do love how close knit the time suck community is. The man whose daughter who had heart surgery, asked for good vibes and prayers,
Starting point is 02:52:27 you updated, she was home, I literally had tears, the man who lost his home in Florida due to the hurricane, you continue to give updates on him or my heart. Probably one I love the most was the woman who worked with the man who requested a boob cake. So I'd like to add my own. My two boys who are 11 and seven, both have cystic fibrosis.
Starting point is 02:52:44 cystic fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, CF is a progressive genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system as well as many other organ systems. It causes thick, sticky mucus to build up in the lungs, which leads to life threatening lung infections. There are approximately 30,000 people with CF in the US, 70,000 worldwide. The projected life expectancy for some was CF is 41 years, nearly half over 45% of the current CF population is 18 years or older. There are over 1900 known CF mutations, approximately one in 31 Americans as a carrier of CF. The carrier rate is approximately one in 25, sounds like worldwide. We raise awareness every year for my boys. We are the bed well boys brigade
Starting point is 02:53:27 And here is our team page where you can read more about our story and it's fightcf.cf.org slash go to slash bed well boys brigade and I'm sure if you Google if you're listing Fight CF and bed well BED WEL boys brigade you can find it So now when I get home from work my husband will ask me which ones I've listened to and we'll have discussions about them fight CF and Bedwell, B-E-D-W-E-L, boys per gait, you can find it. So now when I get home from work, my husband will ask me which ones I've listened to and will have discussions about them. Thank you for bringing my husband and I, something to talk about and listen to together.
Starting point is 02:53:55 Time suck will still be my guilty pleasure at work, while scared of death will be our guilty pleasure together. We are trying to convince my mom to write a story and to scare to death. She actually just listened to the Lamp Mansion episode. I think she may be hooked as well. So that's two new St. Louis listeners. I also have come up with a few topics.
Starting point is 02:54:10 I think it would be great episodes, the Titanic, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Klondike, Gold Rush, Vampires, the 1920s prohibition. If you read this on an episode, I will probably scream like a little girl. We'll get the fuck it screaming, Sarah. Oh, who am I kidding? I will. And my co-workers will definitely know like a little girl. We'll get the fuck it screaming Sarah. Oh, who am I kidding? I will and my co-workers will definitely know I'm nutty. Of course, if you do end up reading this,
Starting point is 02:54:29 you must give the husband a shout out. Chris Bedwell, the one who started my guilty pleasure of time, suck and scared to death. And you know what, you're one awesome standup, you have me dying about the yardstick, about standing in the line, giving people the benefit of the doubt, since you know they're working on themselves,
Starting point is 02:54:43 they're breathing down your neck, but they're no longer hugging your back. Let Chris know how awesome he is. Chris, you're fucking awesome. Your newest fan, Sarah Bedwell. Well, thank you, Sarah. While I'm stuck at home, stuck in the stuck dungeon, it is nice to hear about someone having a good time
Starting point is 02:54:56 at a previous standup show. It makes me very happy. Can't wait to get to back to doing that again. I'm so happy your family can enjoy all of this. I hope you're doing well right now. And I imagine with cystic fibrosis in the family, you are very much employing social distancing right now and the shelter in place. I hope today's episode helped learn some things about the coronavirus,
Starting point is 02:55:14 the COVID-19 pandemic. I hope your update reminds others the wall. You know, we all stay at home while we may be suffering economically. And while that really fucking sucks, we are giving COVID-19 vulnerable people like Sarah's boys a much better chance of not getting sick. And that's something to feel very good about. So I hope you all do feel good about things like that. I hope you're all doing the best you can with the situation.
Starting point is 02:55:39 Hail Nimrod. Stay safe. This too, shall pass. Thanks for sending in your messages Next time suckers, I need a net. We all did That's all for this week unless you listen to scared of death the secret suck and then there's more New standup coming this week on Pandora more content there get out of here devil Sneak in some more consumption while you're flattening your curves and keep on sucking. He's balls deep in pigs the whole week and then on the eleventh it's pinky blew up.

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