COVID-19 for kids with Olivia Attia

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. Hey everyone, welcome to a special edition of the COVID series. This is gonna be COVID for Kids.
So my guest today is my daughter, Olivia. And this was mostly her interviewing me, but also a little bit of a discussion and me asking her some questions as well, all pertaining to the coronavirus, but really through the lens of questions that Olivia had. So if you're a listener of the podcast and you have kids, this might be the one episode that you wanna sort of bring your kids into, because hopefully it answers a lot of the questions that they've probably been asking you, and maybe these are some of the questions you don't have answers to. So anyway, I hope you enjoy this special episode of the coronavirus series, Corona for Kids.

**Olivia Attia** (1:40)
Hey dad, so I know you've done podcasts about questions people had on the coronavirus for adults, but I thought we could do one for kids. So the first thing I'm gonna ask you is, what even is a virus?

**Peter Attia** (1:50)
Well, a virus is a sort of living kind of living thing that has genetic material in it, which all of your cells have genetic material in them. But these viruses, they can't replicate on their own. So you know how like you get big, your hair gets longer, your nails get longer, you get taller, all of these things are cells in your body that are dividing? Well, viruses can't divide without using another body. They don't have the machinery, so to speak, to divide on their own. So they have to infect a host, that's the term we use, to do that. Now it's important to understand how small a virus is. Do you have a sense of how small they are?
Do you think you can see them?
That's right, no way. So a virus is like about 100 nanometers wide. Do you know what a nanometer is?

**Olivia Attia** (2:53)
Something very small.

**Peter Attia** (2:54)
Yeah, it's like a billionth of a meter.
So if we were to cut one of your hairs, and you can barely see the end of your hair when it's cut, right? How many coronaviruses do you think you could line up across the tip of your hair if it were cut?

**Olivia Attia** (3:12)
Probably hundreds.

**Peter Attia** (3:14)
Yeah, about a thousand actually. So think about how small that is.

**Olivia Attia** (3:19)
That's very small.

**Peter Attia** (3:20)
So we can't see these things, but these virtually invisible things without special types of microscopes, they get into our bodies and the bodies of other animals, and they use our body to make more copies of themselves.
And a lot of times when viruses do that, they don't really hurt us or hurt the person or animal that they're infecting, but sometimes they do. So when you think about bad colds that you've had or nasty GI bugs that you've had, that's just a virus that is causing that pain and suffering to you as part of its replicating process.

**Olivia Attia** (4:00)
So I'm sure a lot of people are wondering this. So how do you know so much about this virus?

**Peter Attia** (4:05)
Well, I don't think I know that much about it. I mean, to be clear, I didn't know anything about it until a couple of months ago. So there are people who spend as much time as I spend thinking about longevity or formula one or all the other things that I love to think about. There are people who spend their whole lives thinking about these viruses.
And so I just have talked to a lot of those people, and that's how I've learned the little bit that I think I've learned in the last couple of months. But the reality of it is I'm pretty much a noob.

**Olivia Attia** (4:37)
So how did the coronavirus start?

**Peter Attia** (4:40)