Just How Bad Is COVID-19? - Dr Eric Feigl-Ding - #149

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to modern Wisdom. You may be noticing a slight change in the audio quality today, and that is because I'm recording on my brand new mic setup. Jason Calacanis gave me a bit of shit about what I was recording on a few weeks ago. So I thought, fuck it. Why not spend some of those hard earned YouTube ad revenue dollars on a brand new setup? So here it is. Increasingly, I hear from some of the listeners that they use the show to fall asleep on a nighttime. I'm not sure how much of a compliment it is to hear that people use the show to fall asleep. I'm hoping that it's the dulcet sultry soft tones that are actually sending them to sleep from me and the guest rather than the content itself. But time will tell. And with this brand new lovely warm mic, if you're here to fall asleep, then maybe this will happen even quicker now. Anyway, on to today's guest. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist at Harvard, and he is an advisor to the World Health Organization. So as you can imagine at the moment, he is in the thick of it, dealing with the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. And very fortunately, I managed to get him in between recording for BBC, Iran and ABC News interviews. I managed to get him for a full hour, sit him down and ask him everything that I wanted to know about the outbreak, from where it's come from, what the dangers are, what we can expect moving forward, signs that you could be infected without having to get tested, prevention, is containment gonna work, quarantining strategies, everything. So hopefully this will clear up some of the questions you have about the current situation. Although it's not conclusive, it does give us the information, which is the best that we can ask for at the moment. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding. Oh yeah, PS, if you are new here, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. You will receive one episode every Monday and every Thursday with the world's most fascinating humans delivered directly to your listening device of choice. If we're about to face a global pandemic, you might as well get some content backed up so you can listen to it while you're under quarantine.
This must feel like a war zone for you at the moment.

**Eric Feigl-Ding** (2:42)
Yeah, this epidemic, it's been raging. I think the world woke up to it somewhere in late January, but it's gotten really, really bad since. Just when we think it couldn't get worse, it's gotten worse. Just yesterday, the total mortality, the total number of deaths outside of China actually exceeded the daily deaths inside of China.
The curves have crossed, so now the epidemic is actually worse outside of China, and it's not stopping.

**Chris Williamson** (3:16)
Well, I'm glad that I've got ahold of yourself so that you can try and give us some signal to cut through the noise that everyone has been seeing online. I recently saw Shane Parrish is doing the same thing. He's got some coronavirus experts on. And the most common question that people are asking is to do with trying to work out where the bullshit ends and the information begins.
So before we get started, who are you? Why should we listen to you?

**Eric Feigl-Ding** (3:42)
Yeah, so I'm a public health scientist. I've been a faculty at Harvard for many years. And actually I resigned my faculty to run for Congress, but that's a different story. But I really enjoy science communication and public policy and advocacy, and especially raising alarm about this. My doctorate was in epidemiology. So, the science of epidemics. And although I did other chronic disease, not infectious disease, it's still in my wheelhouse. And I think sometimes in the world, getting a message out there is something that many scientists are not good at. They know so much in their technical area that translating it for the world and making the masses listen is something that's not usually taught. And so, it's something I really enjoy. And especially for this pandemic now, I think waking people up and waking them up early before the tsunami hits is something we have to do in public health and we have to do way better. So, this is why I'm tweeting nonstop about this COVID-19 and trying to make everyone listen.

**Chris Williamson** (4:56)
I get it. Yeah. It's interesting that some of the people that are the best qualified to tell us the technicalities and the specifics about what's happening, perhaps aren't the best qualified to communicate that out, right? And that's, I get what you mean when you say about that. So, okay, let's start. What is coronavirus and what's COVID-19? Is that the same thing?