hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3054.txt

Episode: 3054
Title: HPR3054: Coronavirus Thoughts
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3054/hpr3054.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:52:37

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,054 for Thursday, 16 April 2020.
Today's show is entitled coronavirus thoughts
and is part of the series, Health and Health Care. It is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 18 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is
where we are with this pandemic. And how should we respond? Dash!
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio.
I'm not going to call this an exciting episode.
These times call for something a little different.
But what I wanted to do was to put together some thoughts about
where we are right now with this coronavirus,
based on some of the reading that I've been doing.
And, you know, I'm sitting at home maintaining a social distance,
so I've got to do something.
I'm going to make a disclaimer first.
And I've pointed this out before. I am not a doctor.
I am not a research scientist. At the moment, I'm retired.
I was once a college professor teaching statistics
and research methods.
And I think this helps me in some way to interpret the information I receive.
But when I want to authoritative information, I look to real doctors,
the Center for Disease Control and Qualified Researchers.
And if you want to know more about what I mean by qualified researchers,
you might check out my series on interpreting studies.
And there will be links to that. That was five episodes I did
for Hacker Public Radio that would take you through the whole thing
from beginning to end.
So links will be in the show notes for that.
Now, with the preliminaries out of the way, what do we know?
We know that this is a virus of a type called coronavirus,
which makes it part of the family of viruses that include the common cold,
SARS, and MERS.
Now, what distinguishes this new virus, technically called SARS-CoV-2.
Now, I usually just call it COVID-19, like most reports do.
But what distinguishes it is that it is highly infectious and highly virulent.
Now, highly infectious means it is easily passed from one person to another.
Highly virulent means it can cause death easily.
It has been compared in this respect to the 1918 flu pandemic,
which we estimated infected about 500 million people worldwide.
Now, that was about one-third of the population at that time.
So that would be, if the same proportion holds true,
that would be over 2 billion people in 2020.
Now, the death toll was anywhere from 20 to 50 million people
from this 1918 flu.
And that may be a conservative estimate.
I've seen estimates go as high as 100 million.
Now, why don't we know a precise number?
Well, a signing cause of death is not a precise science.
And in many parts of the world, particularly in 1918,
medical record keeping was not terribly good.
So that gives you an idea of what that could be.
So we could be talking about, again,
keeping the proportion the same, about 200 million people dying if it was the same as 1918.
Now, I don't think it's going to be quite that bad
because medical science is advanced.
So what can help here?
Well, the ultimate answer to this would be a vaccine.
Thankfully, the anti-vaxxers have crawled back under whatever rocks they live under for the time being.
But a vaccine is not a perfect answer right now.
The good news is that coronavirus appears to be one that does not mutate a lot,
which means the vaccine is likely to be more effective than the flu vaccine,
which is kind of guesswork year by year.
And that's because the influenza virus changes every year.
Now, scientists are working on a vaccine right now in a crash program.
And again, there's some good news on that front.
First, Chinese scientists were able to DNA sequence the virus pretty quickly.
That's one of those advances in medical technology that puts us in a better position than we were in 1918.
We've learned how to do rapid DNA sequencing.
They found that this virus shares 80% to 90% of its DNA with the SARS virus,
which is one of the reasons why it's named SARS-CoV-2.
Unfortunately, we don't have a SARS vaccine
because that outbreak died off before work was completed.
And you know why that was because they clamped down and forced people to stay home,
and that's what stopped the disease.
Now, the fact that they started on it means that there's work there that we can build on.
But in general, most researchers have said it will take as much as 18 months even with a crash program.
And I've seen a few people say that even 18 months is ridiculously optimistic.
But with the amount of focus on this, I'm willing to be a little bit optimistic on that.
Usually, the vaccines take a lot longer.
Generally, on the order of a decade or more.
You find a candidate, and then first thing you do is as animal studies, both for safety and for efficacy.
For example, one of the early candidates for a SARS vaccine was actually causing harm to the animals who received it.
You don't go forward with that.
They think they figured out what caused that problem and reformulated it in a way that they don't have that problem anymore.
But, you know, if the animal trials are promising, you can move on to human trials.
Stage one is to test with a small number of healthy volunteers looking specifically to test safety.
You don't want to administer a vaccine that kills everyone or even a significant number of people.
Now, if the candidate passes that test, stage two is to administer the vaccine to a few hundred people in an area where the disease is rampant.
If it looks like it is working and no safety issues have arisen, a final trial can involve several thousand people.
If it passes that, it can be approved for medical use and move into production.
Now, that's not the end of it, because production adds even more delays. It takes a long time.
According to Ronald Claim, who was the Obama administration's Ebola czar, and you know, that's what first got people in our federal government seriously thinking about this, at least until Trump came along.
And what Claim says is developing and testing the vaccine hard as it is isn't the hardest part.
Manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses and getting people to take the vaccine will be harder and take longer.
Now, when I read that, the first thing that jumps into my mind is hundreds of millions, that's just, you know, the population of the United States.
Well, you know, if that's all you're concerned with, fine, but I think people all over the world are going to want this.
So that means we need to be talking about billions.
Now, this process can be accelerated to some degree, but not as much as you might think.
Doing the research to find a candidate that might work will take time.
You know, frequently it starts basically in petri dishes where you put in samples of the virus and then add a candidate and, you know, see if it has any effect and stuff like that.
And there's just no shortcut working through a lot of this stuff.
Finding a candidate is going to take as long as it takes.
There's no royal road here.
Now, that is why researchers say a crash program might deliver something in 18 months, as opposed to the decade or more many vaccines require.
Now, sometimes when these studies are done, you get quick results that can lead to dropping some steps.
For example, if you have a test group and a control group, and the test group recovers quickly while the control group is dying, any ethical researcher will stop the trial and give the remedy to everyone who needs it.
But you're dealing with probabilities in this and, you know, most people really do not understand or feel at all comfortable with probabilities.
They want yes or no answers.
Sadly, life does not give that all the time.
If you're responsible for that decision, if anything goes wrong, you will get all the blame.
So just imagine we have a candidate and we take our time going through all of the testing and it finally turns out, yeah, this thing works.
Well, everyone involved is going to get reamed over. Well, you know, why did you go through all of that time testing?
You should have just rushed it right out there. What's wrong with you?
Scenario number two.
They skipped some of the stages. They rush it into production. They get it out there and it has terrible side effects, large-scale deaths.
At which point all the same people will be going, oh, why did you do that? Don't you know you're supposed to test these things? Why are you so incompetent?
So it's a difficult situation. I'm glad I don't have to make that decision.
I am also apprehensive that the people who do make the decision may not be saying adults.
Okay. If we wait for the vaccine, what about medicines to cure the infection?
Again, there is work being done here. Several different approaches are being studied.
One which we know can work is called convalescent plasma, sometimes convalescent blood or convalescent syrup.
Now, this takes plasma from people who have recovered from the disease and gives it intravenously to someone seriously ill.
It is an old approach, predating vaccines, but it does work.
The transfusion of the plasma contains antibodies made by the person who recovered, and those antibodies can help someone with the disease.
But the obvious problem is that it does not scale very well when new cases keep increasing.
Other approaches are using drugs developed for different illnesses in the hope that they are sufficiently similar to COVID-19 that the medication would be effective.
Now, this is good since those medications have already passed all of the safety tests, but we just don't know enough right now.
Some reports have suggested HIV drugs can help. Other reports say, no, we don't see any sign of it.
So, this may bear fruit, but it may be a while yet.
Now, there is a medicine promoted by Donald Trump called Hydroxychloroquine,
which has not been found effective in any good research and should not be counted on as a valid cure.
There was basically some anecdotal stories coming out of China and Trump seized on it, but he has no idea what he's doing.
Now, that brings us back to the things we know are effective at this point, which is preventing people from passing on the virus by social distancing.
In other words, essentially quarantine and massive testing.
If people stay home and do not interact with other people, they cannot pass the disease along and the outbreak will eventually die off.
Now, this will work if done properly.
To see this, I'll use an example I pulled from Steve Mercky of the Scientific American Podcast,
which requires less than a minute of spreadsheet work.
And it uses a reproduction factor R0, which is the average number of people who get infected by each person who has the virus.
And the way this works is you do 10 rounds.
You start with one person, and then how many people does that person infect?
Now, how many people do those people? In fact, you go through 10 rounds of that.
Now, if the R0 is 1.3, which means on average, each person who is infected will go on to infect 1.3 others.
After 10 rounds of infection, you're only up to 14 people.
But if the R0 is 2.5, which doesn't seem that much different from 1.3,
after 10 rounds, you're up to 9,536 people.
Now, that's a big difference.
And it has a lot to do with the mathematics of exponential growth.
Now, there are two primary factors affecting R0.
One is the inherent infectiousness of the virus.
Now, we already know this is a very infectious virus, and that is a factor completely out of our control.
The other factor is how many people each person interacts with, and that is what we're trying to reduce through social distancing.
Now, testing is still important, even at this stage, because it does several good things.
Now, granted, we should have been doing massive testing three months ago.
If we had a functioning government, we would have.
Some places did.
I think that, for instance, Germany has had a great response in all of this, because they did so much testing early on.
So, why should we do it now that we're in the middle of a massive outbreak?
Well, first of all, it helps with the allocation of resources, if we know exactly where the worst spots are.
In the United States, right now, we've basically got the 50 different states fighting with the federal government,
over just trying to get basic protective equipment.
If a rational situation, if we had rationality in our government, we would be allocating resources based on where they would do the most good.
But you don't know that until you do testing.
Secondly, testing is important because it saves time and equipment in hospitals if we know exactly who is sick and what they're sick with.
Third, this is going to get us data we need to plan for future outbreaks.
This pandemic is not the last one we will face, and this one won't be over soon either.
We have had in relatively recent times SARS, MERS, and now this one.
Now, this one happens to be worse than the others because it's far more deadly and infectious.
The mechanisms by which viruses arise in the wild and start spreading around, those don't go away.
We need to face up to that fact.
Part of that is we need to have a testing regime in place before we can safely start resuming our lives.
Now I'm going to quote from Dr. Eli Perensovich, who is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa.
He says, there's also the fact that eventually we're going to want to go back outside again.
As the current protocol starts to relax, a second wave of infections may arise.
Especially if we don't have a good grasp on where and how many cases we have in the US,
said Dr. Eli Perensovich, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa,
we can't stay in social distancing forever, Perensovich said.
So we need to ramp up testing quickly.
Now, think about that second wave, we had that with the 1918 virus.
That was actually a pandemic that went from 1918 through 1920, and there were several waves.
So the bottom line is that a vaccine is most likely 18 months away.
Medicines may be months away, and right now the best thing we can do as individuals is to isolate.
So, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio.
I want to sign off by reminding everyone to just stay home.
Bye-bye.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dove Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club,
and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on the Creative Commons' Attribution share-alive 3.0 license.