COVID-19 Is Just The Beginning. Here's Why. | Answers With Joe

this video supported by curiosity stream I really didn't want to make this video I had a system I had a lot of really cool videos on the way I was getting a head on video so that I could work on this big project I've been talking about for a while and then this I didn't need this but I was getting so many requests for a video on the coronavirus that eventually I gave in and said okay I guess I need to talk about this and then things have escalated to the point that if I don't talk about it it's kind of ridiculous it's just become such an elephant in the room at this point that to not talk about it just reeks of denial and delusion like I've been trying to think of another time when something took up this much of our mental space that you just couldn't not talk about it the only thing I'm coming up with is 9/11 this is like a 9/11 level event but still I was hesitating to make this video because the story in the news is changing so much every single day that I knew that by the time I got this video made and got it out for you on Monday everything could have changed in fact as I'm recording this I realize I'm probably gonna have to update this in some way somehow before Monday I mean when I first start researching this the NBA was still playing remember the NBA in fact I had a fun little intro sketch that I was gonna do that was really great and would have made perfect sense a week ago but now it doesn't make any sense anymore at all because it takes place in a coffee shop and you can't even go to coffee shops anymore so the information is changing so fast I didn't want to get anything wrong and this is a super important topic I mean if I do a video on quasars and get some things wrong you know that kind of sucks but so what that doesn't you know impact anybody's lives or anything but this video could so it's more important than pretty much any other video that I get all the details right but I'm pretty much guaranteed because things are changing so fast that by the time this comes out some of the details of this are gonna be wrong do you see my dilemma here Plus YouTube is - monetizing coronavirus videos I'm sure you've seen that before some of you may already be commenting about it so in case you haven't heard me say it before t-shirts just saying and also as I'm looking at my subscriptions page it's just nothing but coronavirus videos so I'm sure you're sick of hearing about it now I didn't know exactly how I could approach this that would be any different from anybody so when I think was I tried to kind of narrow the focus of this video a little bit and I enlisted the help of an author named David Kwan who has written a book on pandemics and he's gonna be joining me we did an interview I'll be sharing clips of that I'll share the full interview later on this week so get comfy wrap up in a few hundred rolls of toilet paper and yeah let's talk about this as long as there have been living organisms made up of cells on this planet there have been viruses which are arguably non living organisms taking advantage of those cells to replicate pretty much every single living thing on the planet lizards birds mammals even plants have viruses that are evolved specifically to use their cells to replicate and they evolve really fast they replicate billions of times a day that's billions of chances for some nucleotide to get tweaked or switched around or whatever in 99.9% of the time it doesn't really matter it doesn't make any real changes but every once in a while it does birds get the flu just like we do viruses that have evolved specifically to thrive in birds and mostly they're harmless to humans they're devastating the birds especially in the packed you know viral stew of a poultry farm but every once in a while those animal viruses those bird viruses can mutate and be picked up by humans this is called zoonosis this actually happens pretty often in poultry farms around the world a human can actually pick up a strain of the bird flu and it's usually not a problem it usually stays with that one person because it might have mutated enough to jump from a bird to a person but it hasn't mutated enough to go from a person to a person but again given enough time and enough exposure that last mutation can happen and that's how you get things like the h5n1 avian flu that first popped up in 1997 in Hong Kong it later had a reoccurrence in 2003 in the United States and then again in Canada in 2014 luckily the bird flu doesn't travel very easily from person to person so it has what they call a low path and a genesee but it does have a really high mortality rate around 60% so what does this have to do with our current situation well kind of everything Kove 8:19 didn't come from birds but it did come from the similar process of zoonosis it originated in bats in China and it jumped to humans at a market in Wuhan which has led a lot of people to think that it was because people were eating bats over there they do have bats at that market but it's not necessarily the case that a person got it from eating a bat because bats are what they call reservoir hosts this means that they can kind of carry this virus it kind of hides in bat colonies and sometimes it affects them and gives them symptoms sometimes it doesn't and bats often it doesn't actually but the virus rarely jumps straight from the reservoir hosts into humans it usually requires an intermediary species what they call an amplifier host as David explains did it spread to 27 people or 40 people originally from one little tiny bat the size of a mouse probably not so it must have gone into another animal caught hold they're replicated that animal became an amplifier host that's the term and then that animal probably somehow spread it to a number of human and in this case there's been speculation there was speculation at one point that it was a snake but that seemed to be wrong and then I saw some speculation that it was a Pangolin right the scaly auntie they're really the thing it looks like it looks like an anteater or not or an armadillo but is it I don't know if that hypothesis has been confirmed yeah they haven't figured that out yet amplifier host was okay David by the way is the author of the book spillover animal infections in the next human pandemic which kind of followed his journey working for National Geographic tracing different epidemics across various parts of the world like the Ebola outbreak in Africa he was kind enough to talk to us I'll be sharing his clips throughout this video and I'll be sharing the full interview later on this week by the way if you ever wondered why bats make such great reservoir hosts David did have something to say about that too bats seem to be overly represented as reservoir hosts scary new viruses seemed to be overly represented and that involves two things one bats are the most diverse order of mammals that exists there are a lot of different kinds of bats one in every four species of mammal is of species of bat Wow okay well it was a lot but that's a lot you know one in four so they seem to be over-represented maybe because they're over-represented in the diversity of mammals okay but they probably are over-represented even beyond that they may carry more viruses more active viral presence than the average mammal why would that be well they live a long time a little bat can live up to 20 years oh look a little mouse it's gonna live two years if it's lucky yeah that might live 20 years roosting how well roosting with 60,000 other bats like a big carpet in a cave yeah and wall of a cave that's a great environment for exchanging viruses you talk about social distancing that's not social distancing and then finally their immune systems seem to be different and seeing it seems probable that their immune systems might tolerate the presence of alien DNA or RNA such as an infection and a viral infection why is that well possibly because bats are the only mammal that fly flying puts a lot of stress on their metabolism putting stress on their metabolism in some cases seems to release free DNA from their own cells cells getting beat up and broken open free DNA floating in their bodies even if it's their own can possibly be a target of their immune systems so if bats had rigorous immune systems like us they might be suffering from autoimmune disease most of the time so they seem to have down regulated immune systems everything I just said is hypothetical at this point but it's one of the possible explanations okay so about this particular virus it goes by a lot of different names you've heard obviously coronavirus you probably heard novel coronavirus KO bid 19 you probably heard SARS thrown in there somewhere corona virus is actually an entire subset of viruses you've probably already heard this before that's not the specific name of this virus there were several out there already there were six that were known before this one this one is actually the seventh one and anytime there's a new virus that they find out there they designate it with the word novel which basically means new so this is the novel coronavirus now a couple of names on that list may have stood out to you those being SARS and MERS SAR stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome it first came out in 2003 with about 8,000 people infected I'm reading this because I want to get it right 774 people died in 17 countries around the world at that time making the mortality rate around 9% merge stands for Middle East respiratory syndrome it first popped up in Saudi Arabia in 2012 there have been other outbreaks in 2015 and 2017 so far there been 2500 cases total from MERS and all those outbreaks in 862 deaths which makes the death rate around 34 percent so this new virus was determined to be a new strain of the 2003 SARS virus so it was named SARS CoV 2 that's the actual name of the virus kovat 19 is the name of the actual disease that this virus causes and it was named that stands for corona virus disease 2019 because it was first isolated in 2019 barely unlike December 30th so yeah just like HIV is the virus that causes the disease aids SAR CoV 2 is the virus that causes the disease coded 19 so the disease is coded 19 the actual name of the virus is SAR CoV 2 and the corona virus is just the type of virus that it is okay so a little bit about corona viruses they're called that not because of the beer has nothing to do of the beer it has to do with the fact that they have spikes all the way around the virus which kind of gives it a corona so they called it a corona virus and these spikes connect to receptors on cells that allow them to push their genetic material into the cells and have the cells do their thing to replicate and the genetic material by the way is RNA instead of DNA that's just something that corona viruses do but that also might make them easier to mutate and coronaviruses also usually affect the lungs which is why SARS and MERS both have the word respiratory in there because it attacks the lungs but whereas SARS had around a nine percent mortality rate MERS had a thirty four percent mortality rate Koby 19 is more of around four percent mortality rate but again this is changing every day but the death rate really is almost misleading that's not the worst thing about koban 19 the problem with coven 19 is that it spreads so easily and it's so contagious that even though the death rate is the lowest of the three that I just talked about it has already in three and a half months killed more people than SARS and MERS combined infected in 17 years and I'm really trying hard to not use any numbers in this video because I'm sure those numbers will have already doubled by the time you see this so yeah the death rate isn't what's important here what's important here is what they call the are number which is the number of people that each infected person can infect any r-value that's above one is considered exponential a virus with an R number of even 1.15 is still considered exponential because you're still infecting more people than that one number whereas say one with an R value of 0.85 just a little bit below one that's considered a disease that is under control or on its way out now our number of kovat 19 is somewhere between two and three so it is not under control it is still exponentially growing also by the way if you ever wondered why people made such a big deal about measles that our value of measles is between 12 and 14 and one of the reasons why they spread so easily is because the symptoms are all over the map and they affect everybody a little bit differently for some people that spirals in a fail of pneumonia for some people it's more like a blight flu and some people barely have any symptoms at all and as we've all heard you can actually carry the virus for about five days and be completely asymptomatic and not even know you have it so how big of a deal is that well consider HIV HIV is really not that contagious you can only get it through direct contact with the blood or any kind of sexual contact but it's got a really long incubation period that lasts for years and you can be spreading it during all that time and not even know that you have it and how did that work out for us I'll let David explain I said is this is the biggest thing since the flu of 1918 in terms of infectious disease in the world that's incorrect okay there's a couple of things including something called aids that are important to Rivet yeah thirty-five are we up at 35 million deaths at this point hmm so and and that is a zoonotic disease also that came originally from one chimpanzee a virus that came from one chimpanzee the AIDS epidemic has been a slow-motion epidemic because the disease kills slowly and because it transmits relatively slowly this is a fast one similar to the 1918 influenza so we knew started traveling around in January of a totally new virus that we have no treatments for that spreads easily through the air the long contagious incubation period a high r-value in a wide range of symptoms this is why epidemiologist started getting really concerned luckily our world leaders listen to the experts and started testing right away you know how in every Hollywood disaster movie there's always some scientist telling the army or the president that there's this horrible thing coming and nobody listens to them and you're watching it you're like that would never happen in real life that's totally happening in real life to be fair to the world leaders though a lot of people aren't taking this seriously enough especially young people so all the old folks out there if you'll pardon me for just a second I'm gonna I'm gonna turn over here and talk to the youth for a minute hi youths I know with your smooth skin and non aching joints and general having of energy you feel pretty uh neural to pretty much everything in general and probably especially in vulnerable to this I mean you've seen the charts that show that only gross saggy old people are gonna die of this and I don't know maybe let's just get real maybe you're cheering it on I mean the boomers have given you a lot of Hell over the years and maybe this feels like it come up and I get it but there are some reasons why you really should take this seriously you know as I said before the death rate might not be that high but the hospitalization rate is pretty high 9 or 10 percent some people say might be up to 20% and yes that's overall and it's not affecting your age group as much but there's still a lot that we don't know about this we don't know a lot about why it affects some people some ways and other people in other ways and we don't know the long-term effects of it plus it's already mutating out there in the population there's now two strains that we're following and it could mutate again into something that could affect you a lot more and there actually have been a lot of anecdotal reports from doctors and nurses of patients in their 20s on respirators in the ICUs that had no previous risk factors do you know how expensive a couple of weeks and the ICU is and yes you may survive but we don't know what kind of permanent damage this can do to the lungs how that might affect you for the rest of your life or leave you vulnerable to other infections later on so look I'm not trying to pick on Millennials here that's never been my thing but I've been hearing a lot of people my age and younger being really flippant about this and just being like oh you know it only kills old people and here's the thing first of all that's not true second of all you don't know what kind of damage it can cause for you for the rest of your life and number three you should care about other people so look I'm not gonna waste your time talking about all the things that you need to be doing the washing the hands or self-isolation flattening the curve reducing the strain on the hospitals all that kind of thing you've heard all that a million times before I'm not gonna waste your time talking about it here but at the risk of being yet another bearer of bad news I do have to talk about how this is really just the beginning this sudden germophobia this self isolation this new way of kind of being in the world working from home doing all that kind of stuff this is the new normal and it's gonna be for quite some time it's gonna be at least a year before we have any kind of vaccine that can actually put an end to this thing so we're gonna have to sort of self vaccine through isolation for a long time and this may kind of go away a little bit in the summer viruses do tend to kind of do that but if the pandemic of 1918 the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 has any bearing on this it will actually come back in the fall stronger than ever so however you're feeling about this the bad news is sorry you're just gonna have to get used to it this this is our new reality Kove in nineteen is not going anywhere anytime soon a lot of businesses are gonna suffer a lot of people are gonna lose their jobs we could see an economic depression or at least a very severe recession in the coming year or two a lot of government policies are gonna be passed to try to offset the worst of this a lot of fingers are gonna be pointed a lot of credits gonna be taken and oh yeah a lot of people are gonna die there is a decent chance that somebody you know will die this year from this disease I know that sounds like over-the-top fear-mongering but it's really not outside the realm of possibility a lot of what we're talking about right now it still feels very abstract to us but it's not going to stay that way at some point in the next few months this is gonna get very personal and very real to all of us but we will eventually get through this hopefully a little wiser on the other side maybe we'll actually start listening to experts again if history is any guy that usually takes some kind of massive disaster for us to make some real positive changes in society and there's a lot of reasons to be positive there's been a lot of positive response out there a lot more community building that's been going on people seem to be a bit more compassionate with each other than they were before here in my neighborhood we got a Facebook page you know and some people put together a little shamrock hunt for the kids so they asked everybody to put shamrocks up in their window so people did that and they took their kids around and they took pictures of it just as a way of putting some joy out there in the world you know people trying harder to patronize small businesses they're a lot more vulnerable in times like this as we should be doing this will get worse before it gets better but sometimes it takes a big setback to move society forward in the mean time to quote mr. Rogers focus on the helpers there's gonna be a lot of heroes that come out of this whole thing one that definitely needs to be called out right up front as dr. Lee when yang he was an ophthalmologist in Wuhan and he's considered The Whistleblower of this whole thing because he's posted on social media about a SARS like virus that he was seeing in some of his patients this was on December 30th and he was actually arrested by the Chinese government and admonished for spreading rumors which I guess is something you can get arrested for over there and he actually wound up contracting the disease eventually and died of it on February 7th he was only 33 years old so yeah again it's not just old people but health care workers on the front lines of this thing thank you I know your lives are already being turned upside down and you're putting yourself in harm's way if you are one of them I want to extend my thanks and anybody out there who knows any health care workers reach out to them help them out in any way that you can they are total heroes in this situation truckers and delivery drivers are going to be the unsung heroes in this whole thing they're keeping our supply chains moving they're keeping the shelves stocked and the food in our pantries without them everything it would grind to a halt and they don't have the luxury of just sitting at home and waiting this thing out they're putting themselves out there so to you guys thank you and if you know any people that work in this service industry in the event industry in the travel industry they're gonna be hit hardest by this so help them out in any way you can but one last thing when I say that this is not gonna be the end COBIT 19 is not the end when I say this is a new normal I'm not just talking about kovat 19 there will be more viruses like this this is not the last of them as we continue to spread into more wild habitats as we continue to do factory farming in creating those conditions as the planet continues to warm as we travel more than we've ever traveled before we are creating more and more opportunities for these kinds of animal to human jumps and viruses than we've ever seen I'll let David have the last word on that one well this thing this coronavirus has gone so far now that it's gonna be difficult for people once it's under control once we've dealt with it no matter how terrible it's been or maybe not so terrible it's gonna be difficult but not impossible for people to forget mmm how unprepared we were for this one we need people to remember and be better prepared for the next one so yeah there's anything we can learn from this virus and from this experience is that we're all in this together classes races nationalities none of that matters anymore we are all in this together and we have to help each other out my social distancing means somebody else's life you know taking care of others is taking care of ourselves until Elan can get a million people on Mars there's just nowhere else for us to go and we're also in this together with all the animals on the planet you know we've always like to think of ourselves as separate from the animals but we're not zoonotic viruses like this just remind us that we are just one of millions of species occupying this big blue petri dish out there in space I want to thank David again for taking the time to talk with me again I'll be putting out the entire interview on Thursday but if you want to check out his book which I highly recommend it's called spillover I'll be putting a link down in the description below and if you want to keep up with the latest news on coronavirus one good place to go is the breakthrough series which you could find on curiosity stream break there is an exclusive weekly series that explores the top science stories of the day and they've done a couple of episodes on the corona virus recently they'll be on the leading edge of that topic and videos in the future I'm sure and of course is just one of many series on curiosity stream as well as feature-length documentaries on everything from health astrophysics history and more by some of the best filmmakers in the world look if you're wondering what to do with all this time where you're stuck at home right now curiosity stream is a great way to go if you like the kind of content I make I can only make so many videos it's definitely a go to streaming service for me and it's only $2.99 a month so it's easily the best bang for your buck especially since when you sign up for curiosity stream you also get access to nebula a streaming service by the educational youtubers like minutephysics real-life lore real engineering and myself where you can go see our videos ad free as well as nebula originals that you can't find anywhere else it's a space where your favorite creators can explore new ideas and work outside the confines of the YouTube algorithm so if any of that sounds good to you you can give it a try for 30 days for free if you go to curiosity stream coms last Joe Scott and again you get access to nebula along with that and when your 30 days is up again it's only $2.99 a month it's awesome so curiosity stream comm slice Joe Scott link is down the description big thanks to curiosity stream for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are supporting my team and really helping to keep this whole thing afloat we need it now more than ever so I really do appreciate you guys there's some new people that are joined let me shout out their names murder their names real quick I should say Sam chompers this is the best one free John Gould gag son I think that's an elfish language Larry site and Jeff Alexander Nishant reviewer Todd Jones and Jen Hollingsworth thank you guys so much if you would like to get early access to videos access to me cool people on the discord channel and exclusive stuff behind the scenes bloopers stuff like that that you can't find anywhere else you can go to patreon.com/scishow again the t-shirts are available at the store answers dojo comm slash store I know this video is probably going to be to monetize so anything that you can get there helps to support this video shows a little bit of things I appreciate it please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this one Google thinks you might like that one or any of the others that might be showing you on the side to have my face on it and if you enjoy them and you're not subscribed I invite you to subscribe cuz I come back with videos every Monday so before we go I just want to wish you guys to be safe take care of yourselves please do take this seriously I know I'm gonna get a whole lot of comments or saying oh it's only ninety eight seven percent survival rate and there's a lot of people um saying only old people are gonna die it's just like the flu guys stop just listen to the experts do what they say we will get through this otherwise this can be a total disaster so take it seriously love you guys and I'll see you next time around please

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,658,508

Keywords: answers with joe, covid-19, pandemic, david quammen, spillover, zoonosis, sars, mers, china, wuhan, social distancing, bats, ebola, hiv

Id: AbKMNpYBCTc

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020