 Thanks for coming and thanks for dealing with me while I unmute myself. Glad you could make it today. I'm Laura Helmuth. I'm the editor in chief of Scientific American and I'm talking today with Carl Zimmer who is the matter columnist for the New York Times. Thanks for coming to this social distancing social. As you heard, this is part of Future Tense. It's an ongoing series and Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America and Arizona State University. So we thank them for having us here today and for bringing all of you together and we're here to get to your questions. But to start out, Carl and I will talk a bit about what's been the most ridiculous few months of anybody's lives, but especially for science journalists. And I was just looking at Carl's author page at the New York Times, it is matter column. And since February, you've written exactly one story that was not about coronavirus in some way or another. Yeah, no, it's kind of weird. I realized I think at the beginning of March, I said, oh my gosh, I will be writing about one virus for months. I mean, it's weird enough to just write about viruses but just one virus. Yeah, so it's, but it must be a lot like that for you at Scientific American where you just every day you've got your new batch of coronavirus stories to put together. Yeah, yeah, that's all, that's pretty, I mean, it's not all we've been doing. So your one story was about snakes and regeneration and we've had, you have to keep up with some space stories. And then of course we've been having at Scientific American a lot of stories about Black Lives Matter and about systemic racism in the sciences in the world for public health. So that's the other big story that we, you know. You know, my snake story, you mentioned it, now that you mentioned it, I forgot that was my snake story. That does not count because like, if you read that story, you're like, huh, there's Carl hanging out in somebody's basement with a bunch of pythons. Like how does he get to hang out with a bunch of pythons in a guy's basement in a pandemic? Well, I did it in December and filed the story in December, beginning of January. And then, you know, my editor was like, yeah, we'll get to it, but we're starting to get busier and busier with this virus. We'll get to it, I promise. And then all of a sudden boom, nothing. And so, you know, it just, it kind of, you know, finally made it out, I forget in April or something like that. But, you know, it's been so crazy with the sort of editorial side of things, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's, it's hard to remember, you know, back in the days when we wrote about other things and weren't constantly in coronavirus crisis. So it's even hard, it seems like every, you know, every few weeks, the story shifts. And I think that's been one of the challenges of covering it is, you know, it's, you know, in science in general, as you learn more things, the story expands and grows. And sometimes what you learned before was wrong and you evolve, but it's been happening so quickly with this. And what are some of the kind of pivots that you remember where we were, you know, we thought we knew one thing and then we knew another and it's still changing all the time? Well, you know, I, you know, I wrote a book called The Planet of Viruses a few years ago. And so I was writing there about diseases like Ebola and SARS and just talking about, one of the themes of the book was about how new viruses emerge. And so I've gotten to know that stuff pretty well. And so in January, you know, I started seeing these reports about this mysterious pneumonia in China and I thought, this doesn't look good. But, you know, but like you, you, I mean, I think we had seen enough of these things where like, you know, SARS was scary, but it, it flamed out, bird flu. Like that would be really bad if bird flu really was able to take off. But, you know, it's, you know, a lot of times it just peters out. MERS is another one. So I just, I kind of thought, well, chances are this will be another one of these things that just doesn't really, you know, it's bad for the people to get it, but then it'll just, maybe it'll just be something that is a problem in hospitals. And, you know, once they kind of work things out in hospitals, then we'll be done. But, you know, when they closed down the whole city of Wuhan, which is bigger than New York, I said, oh dear, like this is, this is something different. And there's, you know, this will, this will be all over the world. I mean, there's, how, how can it not be? So I think I had that sort of like switch in January. And then I ran into my colleague, Don McNeil, at a sort of a gathering for, for the newspaper. And I said, hey, Don, so Don has like covered all sorts of pandemics. And this was like mid or late January. I like, so what do you think? And he's like, it's gonna be a pandemic. And then, you know, took a sip of his drink and I was like, okay, here we go. That's when I started becoming one of the crazy ones. I don't know if you started to become one of the crazy ones telling your friends like, get some food stuck up on prescriptions. This may not be good. Yeah, exactly. That's it. So at the time, so I'm new to Scientific American. I was working at the Washington Post until, you know, decades ago, which was just April. But that's, that's how we were too. That I was the editor of the health and science desk and some of our reporters, Lena Sun, and especially like realized right away, oh, shit, this is gonna be a pandemic. This is really bad. And so one of the things that's interesting is science journalists knew right away. Obviously epidemiologists did, virologists did, experts in the field did. And there was a time when, you know, people accused us of, well still do sometimes, of fear mongering and why are you exaggerating this? It's only a problem in China because of where they grocery shop. And it's only a problem in Italy because they kiss each other on the cheeks. So it's amazing like how much psychological distancing people did to avoid kind of believing what we were telling them from the beginning that, you know, this is really freaking serious. Well, but also, I mean, I think we all might have, in the United States might have assumed that, well, if it does get here, our super amazing healthcare and biomedical system will just sort of squash it like a bug, you know. And I don't think we quite appreciated what a disaster our testing regimen was and how gutted our public health systems really were. And I mean, we're paying the price. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's been an interesting, like, reachable moment because, you know, as health and science reporters, we knew some of these problems and had tried to get people interested and engaged, but it's really hard to get people to care about public health when there isn't a pandemic. You know, it's really hard to get the credit for stopping bad things from happening. So it's been interesting too. And, you know, we've run, I'm sure you guys have too, plenty of articles about the lack of pandemic preparedness and all the drills that everybody went through and showed we weren't ready. But boy, I mean, even knowing all that is shocking how not ready and how much the Trump administration has just squandered learning from the rest of the world and learning, you know, state by state. And I think that's, so the title of this event is Science Journalism's Finest Moment. And, you know, I think you and I probably wouldn't necessarily agree that it's the finest moment, but the most important moment because we're getting information out when it's not happening the way it should through the public health system and through leadership at the top, is that, how do you think that's kind of complicated your reporting and how you in the times are approaching this? Well, you know, I mean, it's, it is interesting, you know, I was talking with a colleague, Maren McKenna, about this, about how we, for years, have sort of like been, you know, rather obsessed with all sorts of scary pathogens. And then we just said, like, here we go. Like, this is it. Like, this is, you know, we've been in the, we've been waiting to, you know, to perform under these situations where like, the whole world wants to know what's going on with this totally new virus. So we can bring our skills as best we can. And it's so, honestly, like, you know, I personally find it very therapeutic. If I was just sitting around just kind of watching this pandemic just wash over us, without being able to do anything, it would be really, it would be harder. It's hard, but it would be harder. So like, it's, in a weird way, it's sort of journalism as therapy because I can share information, you know, things that are being learned for the first time, I can like share them with other people who want to know about it. And that's, and it's really, I feel, I feel very privileged and fortunate to be in a situation to do that. On the other hand, it is weird because like, you get into a situation like where you just by reporting, like what scientists are figuring out, you will get attacked. And, you know, I even like, I did not expect that I would get attacked by the president of the United States on Twitter for an article on virus genomes. But he reacted very badly to a story where I explained how most of the viruses in the epidemic in New York had been brought by people from Europe. Somehow that wasn't giving China enough credit or something like that. Anyway, yeah, so it's been weird and unexpected and all the rest. But, you know, I mean, I think that, you know, I think we science writers have to just recognize that, you know, we have a really important job to do and we need to do it well. Yes, yeah, that's, at the post, we had an article by Carolyn Johnson and William Won. They found a CDC playbook for how to communicate during a pandemic. And it was this just basically list of here's what you do and here's how you do it to kind of minimize the panic and keep people informed. And they went through all the rules and it concluded that the Trump administration is breaking every single rule in the rule book for how to deal with the pandemic. So not being honest, not being transparent, not bringing out spokespeople who are, you know, apolitical but letting Mike Pence run the response and just absolutely everything you could do to make it wrong. And that was before he started mocking people for wearing masks and, you know, in having a rally in a place where exposure was spiking. So it does seem like, you know, we like to think of ourselves as journalists in general as, you know, producer, you know, sharing important information, but it's just, you know, outrageous for this, in this case, like how much journalists are the only source of good information in this country at least. Yeah, and I mean, we're also competing with all, you know, all sorts of pieces of information floating around that people may choose to accept as the truth. And so, you know, when I was, when I'd be writing about hydroxychloroquine or, you know, sharing like the latest study on hydroxychloroquine showing that it wasn't really working so well, you know, I would get, you know, people would help me on social media with links to YouTube. So there would be some, you know, no, seriously, like someone would be like, oh, well, yeah, but what about this YouTube video by some, you know, diet doctor in California? What about that, you know? And like, you know, why someone would take that one testimony from someone you don't even know over a randomized controlled trial is, it's frustrating, but, you know, part of I think what we are needing to do is also kind of to explain or to remind people, well, how does science actually work? I mean, how do we know what we know? I mean, you take something you feel better, you don't know what the cause and effect is there. You just don't, you can't. And, you know, randomized trials are the kinds of things you need to figure out cause and effect. And so we have to, you know, it's good for us to get into the nuts and bolts of, you know, is this virus a blood clang disorder and what, you know, what receptors latch onto, but we also need to remember the basics or philosophical foundations of science too. They matter too in a moment like this. Yeah, absolutely. And that's been a really important part of the coverage. And I hope that it's building capacity in a way and in the audience, just in the world in general, that, you know, in the space of a few months, people have learned all these kind of principles of how diseases spread and vocabulary like are not and asymptomatic transmission and all these things that we never would have been able to stick into a newspaper or a magazine without some kind of explanation. And now, you know, we're kind of building up a shared knowledge base and shared vocabulary. And I'm hoping it's, you know, making people more educated. Obviously there's plenty of pockets of people who are, you know, getting their news from bad sources. But that's, I'm hoping that we can build on that and have, you know, have a greater appetite for real science and health journalism in the future, you know, as we make our way out of this pandemic. But don't you think, I mean, I applaud your optimism, but I mean, don't you get a sense just from the past month that like people, I mean, people really don't want to be in a pandemic. They don't want to be thinking about a pandemic. They'd like to get back to the life they had and, you know, as soon as they can stop thinking about this, they're going to want to stop thinking about it. So how are you like a scientific American going to like, when that wall goes back up, like how are you going to break through it? Yeah. And so we'll see, and it's an, you know, it's a, it's an empirical question. We'll see, because we have data, which is traffic. So right now, you know, traffic's through the roof for science stories, like it never has been, you know, I hope there's the principle that the more you learn about something, the more interesting it is. Like, if you start, you know, learning about birds and all of a sudden you're fascinated and the more you learn, the more you can learn or sports or business or anything else. Of course, we don't have any competition right now from sports. So that's got to give us an advantage too. A lot of variables will be changing all at once. Yeah. But, you know, we, we do, I think we do in science journalism, we do have to do, I don't know what we can do, but we have to keep people, keep their eye on the ball. You know, I mean, because I think like, you know, if all goes well, like, you know, you and I and everyone else will be getting vaccinated maybe in a year and that'll be great. But, you know, that was COVID-19. There will be COVID-25, there will be COVID-29, there will be influenza, there'll be some virus we haven't even named yet. And, you know, like, this is not how it should go next time. It's just like, like, there need to be like serious, a serious different approach to all this. And, you know, and I just think that journalism might just have to be the way to get people to do this. Yeah, I hope next time people will understand social distancing immediately and understand masks immediately and everything else, but I hope we don't have to find out with the next one. There will be a next one. There will be, yeah, there will be a next one. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even just in bats alone, you know, bats have tons of coronaviruses in them, you know. So, and other mammals have coronaviruses in them too. So, we know that because of research that now the administration is defunding. Yes. We have to, like, report on that too, not just on the scientific findings, but on the politics that is affecting how the science is getting done. Yeah, and that's, I hope that is not getting lost as people, you know, think about their own safety and their own worries, but exactly that, defunding this project that had been doing excellent work on tracking, you know, emerging pathogens because one of the scientists is in China. I mean, it's just unspeakably bad after doing everything wrong. And it's killing people. Like, we didn't have to have this many dead people and it's all because of bad policies. And then when you look at how, you know, CDC, which led the conversation about Ebola, about Zika, about every other past pandemic, like they've been just excluded from the conversation. You can't get an interview with anybody there and they're not having briefings. And this is, yeah, it's dangerous. It's a public health menace, the way that this is being handled by the White House. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does make just doing journalism itself hard if you want to get someone on the phone just to find out what's going on and then either they're not gonna talk or they're going to have to go through some laborious public information process, you know, you just want to like report the story. Yeah, so on a happier note, one of the things that I mean, relatively speaking, I think one of the things we're getting better at in real time is data visualizations. And everybody admires what you guys have been doing at the times with graphics and interactive visualizations. And would you like to share some of the ones that you've worked on just to show? I mean, it's really hard because viruses are invisible and in this case, sick people often are invisible. You can't always tell when somebody's sick because of the asymptomatic transmission. So to help people understand it really helps to display something in a visual way. And you guys have just done some gorgeous work. Well, you know, this was like a real big surprise. I'm just sharing a screen now, showing some of these things. As soon as I realized like corona virus is gonna be our thing, I just said to my editor, like I'd like to sort of like delve into sort of the basic biology of this virus because that's kind of where my interests lie. And I think that a lot of people are gonna be curious about it. And Jonathan Corm who does the graphics at the science times, apparently he had also had similar thoughts. And so we started working on things like, you know, we did one about how just the basics of how the virus infects cells. And then we did this one in April where we basically like once the genome got sequenced and scientists were looking at a gene by gene, we just said like, okay, well, what do you mean by this genome? And it wasn't mean that it makes, you know, has 29 genes and we sort of go through and kind of lay these things out and, you know, protein by protein, we would explain it. And we even like actually, this is like the actual code. And I think it might be the first time we've ever done a whole genome in the newspaper like this. So, you know, this was really a really satisfying experience and I, you know, a lot of people appreciated it. Another thing was like everyone kind of would be freaking out about viruses mutating. And, you know, you just wanna say like, well, look, viruses mutate, like that's what they do. And that isn't necessarily a reason to freak out. So we did something sort of step by step showing how viruses mutate as, and then how they mutate as they spread around the world. And, you know, that's a really important thing to know because you can track where it goes. This is how we know, for example, that New York got its viruses mainly from Europe. And they, you know, the virus originated in China, spread to a number of places, including Europe. And then from Europe went to, went to the United States. So there was one in Seattle, that seems to have been a dead end. And then, you know, it can skim down here and then you can see getting to Europe and then coming into New York. So, and then the most recent thing we've done is basic, you know, as you said, everyone's sort of moving into new things. And, you know, we're actually at the point now where vaccines are going into safety trials, expanded trials, efficacy trials. Like this is happening at an unprecedented speed and there's so many of them. So Jonathan and I kind of worked out like, okay, how can we sort of create a living document that people can come back to and just sort of see where things stand. And so we break down the vaccines by different types and, you know, just give some information on each one. And, you know, we're gonna just ride this thing out until hopefully until we have vaccines and this is old news. But right now it's in the thick of it. So that's what we've been doing. So let me stop sharing. I mean, you folks have been doing amazing stuff too with visualization. I think, you know, this is a situation where we need to bring all our tools, you know, not just storytelling but working with gifted artists and designers just to like convey these things as effectively as possible. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I'm trying to, yeah, I'm having a hard time finding it but Scientific American also has a really fun visualization of the virus that's very detailed and it's very accurate, very high res. Beautiful, it's beautiful. I'm, you know, like having got into this stuff, you know, I am, you know, quite jealous of it. Yeah, everyone should go to Scientific American and check out this 3D visualization of the virus. And just to sort of get us, I think one of the things that these things get across is that you've got this virus which is so tiny and has only 29 genes, you've got 20,000. And yet it just manages to, you know, play ourselves like a musical instrument. I mean, it just uses ourselves to churn out so many new viruses and to dodge our immune system along the way and it's amazing. I mean, if it wasn't so scary and horrific, it would be fascinating. It would just be an intellectual delight except that it's just the worst thing in our lifetime. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. So if you haven't yet, if you have questions for Carl or me, please add them to the chat box function or there's a Q and A function. So yeah, add your questions there and we'll turn it over to you guys in a minute. Yeah, for the one more question, you know, we've seen just an unprecedented number of scientific papers coming out, sometimes released before peer review, sometimes getting through very fast peer review, the poor journals, I mean, we're exhausted, they're exhausted. But have you noticed any changes or any principles or any kind of lessons from how this is happening so quickly and how we're trying to keep up and keep accurate and have the most useful information? Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, I mean, I don't know what it's been like for you, but for me, it's, I mean, I was, you know, started science journals and, you know, back in the day when you really just waited for, you just waited for things to make their way through peer review, you know, someone would have a study or a discovery and it would just chug its way, reviewers would go over it and, you know, want them to make changes and so on. And then, you know, you would get hold of the paper and then, you know, write about it. And now, you know, for years now, preprints have become more and more common. And then now, you know, it's just been an overdrive where like you have preprints or like people will just like, just hand you a manuscript that they haven't even put on a preprint server and then now what do you do with it? And there's so many, like, you know, hundreds a day. And so then you're trying to like sift through them and figure out what you're gonna write about, what's important, what's not. I mean, I'd be curious how you manage it. I mean, for me, one of the things I do is I just try to like create these sort of informal like peer review processes, you know, I'll just find scientists who, you know, out of the goodness of their heart will take a look at a paper and just give me just the heads up or heads down, you know, because, you know, invariably, the ones with the most exciting titles or the most suggestive abstracts, you know, an expert who you respect will be like, oh, this is terrible. Like they present no evidence to justify this conclusion. This will never get into a journal. Unfortunately, you know, some of our colleagues do not do that and we get a lot of garbage being touted as hot new science. And it could be really destructive, I think, unless journalists are more careful. But I mean, what's your attitude towards this stuff? Mm-hmm, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, the responsible reporters have to do their own version of peer review, especially with the most, you know, sensational stories. And, you know, especially if it hasn't been through the normal peer review process, but even if it has, you have to do a kind of a post-publication peer review and talk to people who would know and really try to poke holes in the story before you amplify it. And that's something, I think, you know, so we're a long-time science journalist, but, you know, right now at a lot of newsrooms, everybody's a science journalist. Yeah. You know, no disrespect to the people who were covering sports or movies before, but, you know, they're kind of coming to it new. And so you've probably done a lot of this too, but at the post, especially there was, you know, one of the things that was pulling the health and science reporters away from what they were doing is helping everybody else come up to speed and basically stopping, you know, stopping bad things from happening, stopping mistakes from getting published. That's, you know, the kind of the thankless but very important task. Yeah. I have the one example I can think of is I would, so there are these that, you know, the virus is mutating as I mentioned. And, you know, there are some variants that, you know, with certain mutations that are more common than others. And so, you know, people are saying like, well, is that because it's mutated and become some sort of like super scary new kind of virus? And, you know, so I have, and this is, this is very tempting for people and to report on. And so I will, you know, I have to, I have to really, you know, very carefully go through with people like things like the founder effect, you know, in other words, like here's a basic, this is a super basic, you know, 80 year old scientific concept about how like something, some mutation can be common just by pure luck, just because the person or the virus that showed up someplace first happened to have it. And there's no other reason than that. And yeah, so you do have to like make, you know, I mean, if I was having to write about, you know, basketball, I mean, a basketball writer would have to be advising me on all sorts of stupid basic stuff that I don't get about basketball. I totally get that. So, you know, I'm there to perform the same service. Good, thank you. So I want to turn to the questions from the audience and start off with one, how do we address racial disparities in healthcare and our COVID-19 coverage, especially without kind of othering the people who are disproportionately sick and dying of the disease? And I want to point out, if anybody hasn't read it yet, Carl Zimmer's latest book is called, She Has Her Mothers Laugh. And it's about the history of genetics and studies of heredity. And one of the big themes in the book is that if you look, you know, if you look at the history of science, it's just permeated and distorted and warped in so many ways by racism. And, you know, I think we're seeing that now, you know, in the modern response to the coronavirus pandemic in lots of different ways. And are you dealing with that much in your coverage? Because I'm writing about sort of basic biology, I haven't been dealing with it that much myself directly, but my colleagues certainly have been in terms of like, you know, healthcare reporters who are looking at, well, what are the different outcomes and what are the causes of those outcomes? And I'm certainly following those very closely because it is one of the big stories of this pandemic. And, you know, it really highlights the importance of understanding that, you know, racism is an ideology, but it's an ideology that has biological effects. In other words, you know, people can suffer physically from racism and just need to look at the pandemic, but it's nothing new. I mean, you know, the effects of racism have, you know, harmed the health of African-Americans and other minorities for decades. And in a way, that's kind of why this pandemic is hitting one of the reasons it's hitting African-Americans and other minorities so hard. You know, if you are a community that has a lot of, say, diabetes or other chronic conditions that could have been dealt with through a more fair healthcare system, you're gonna be at a greater risk for the severe outcomes of COVID-19. If you are an essential worker, which basically, you know, that might mean you're a bus driver, you're a nurse. In other words, you are in a job where there are many African-Americans and other minorities who are working, you're gonna be exposed more to the virus. That, you know, there's not, but yet there's nothing, we're very tempted to sort of biologize heredity and to say like, oh, well, clearly, there must be something having to do with black people's biology that must explain this. So it must be inside of them. And that is such an old tradition of saying like, oh, okay, here's a group of people we're gonna call a race and then we're gonna ascribe all sorts of biology to everyone who's a member of that race and might have to do with diseases, you know, and blacks have no monopoly on this. Jews, for example, were thought to be somehow uniquely prone to getting diabetes in the early 1900s. It was literally called like the Jewish disease until people discovered like, oh, this just happened to be, you know, other factors that led to this group of Jews having diabetes. It's been the same with blacks and high blood pressure and so on, where you really need to look at the experience that a group of people has rather than thinking that it's hidden somewhere in their DNA. Yeah, yeah, we had, and that's how we've been trying to cover it too at Scientific American and at the Post. I mean, I think the othering is a real problem that has been throughout this, you know, when people thought, oh, it's just China, it's just Italy, it's just people with preexisting conditions, which is basically everybody either has a preexisting condition or loves somebody who does. So, you know, and also the elderly and infirm are people too. So there's been really hard, frustrating to try and break through and to get people to pay attention that these are real people and there's more than 100,000 who've died and it didn't need to happen. Somehow, like, I never get blamed for my risk of getting COVID because I'm a man, you know, like men are a greater risk of the severe outcomes of COVID, but no one ever says like, well, you know, you men, when you're men-ness, I mean, like that never comes up because like we are not, you know, we are not one of these people, groups of people who get that put on us. But, you know, that does raise my risk. Probably me being type A probably does put me at a risk, you know, but, yeah, but we can't, you know, we can't, maybe it's a way that people deal with the anxiety of being in a pandemic that we just wanna say like, oh, it's not that bad, it's just this one group and that there's other group that has to deal with the problem. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, we had an article the other day that grew out of a quote, somebody got while they were interviewing for another story and the quote was, race isn't the risk factor for dying of COVID-19, racism is the risk factor. And so we turned that into a Q and A to really unpack that and we've had a few more stories along those lines and more in the works because I think it is a moment to, you know, really emphasize that, you know, social injustice is deadly in so many different ways and we're seeing it really amplified in this pandemic. I know, I think, I mean, it's gonna be hard to tease out all the ways in which that ends up with that, you know, that with, you know, the black community being hit so hard by COVID-19. There are a lot of different ways that racism can manifest itself. I mean, even like in a hospital in the way that black patients are treated by nurses and doctors, and not because the nurses and doctors like, you know, hate black people, but because, you know, just through the sort of racist, structural racism, they may sort of just see people, they may take people's complaints less seriously. I mean, that's been, that's actually been documented before the pandemic. Yes, there's data. Let's see, a bunch of good questions. One, is there anything that you wish you or science journalism in general had done differently in the earlier days of the pandemic? And I can take that one as you think about it. I had, I've been able to see the questions before you, so I've got an answer ready, which is that I really wish we had pushed back against this idea that the only way you can get it is by touching a surface and then touching your face. I mean, it was the best evidence at the time, but I mean, it's a respiratory infection. Respiratory infections spread when you, you know, when you expire respiratory droplets and I wish we'd really pushed more on that and pushed back against the idea that masks don't protect you or masks aren't necessary, because it seems like looking back on it, that's such a kind of Western expectation where you look at other countries where wearing masks, if you're sick or other people are sick, is just part of the social contract and it seems to work really well. So if I could go back in time, that's what I would push more on. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, the funny thing is I'm not, it's a little hard for me to answer that question from my own perspective, because literally like in January and February, I was actually sort of dialing down my work for the newspaper because I was working on my next book, which is about the meaning of life. And I was just sort of like, just like, okay, like I got a lot to think about. So I'm gonna sort of dial down stuff and other things and just focus on working on my book. And yeah, and so like, I just would sort of see this with sort of creeping dread that there was this other thing coming along and then I just realized I had to put my book on pause. But so yeah, but looking back on that sort of January and February, it's, you know, I do, I mean, I don't think we should beat ourselves up too much. I mean, we can always learn from our mistakes, but, you know, hindsight is 2020 and like, you know, like there just wasn't, there was so little data about this entirely new virus. And so I think we were trying to like work by analogy, you know, like, oh, like, well, if this is like SARS and it might be like this or if this is like influenza would be like this. And, you know, rather than letting the virus speak for itself, but it takes time, you know, we know so much more now about this particular virus. And I hope readers are okay with us kind of like revising our reporting. Like we are going to be talking about things that we weren't talking about in March. And that's not because we were holding back, but because the science has evolved. Yeah. And I think that's something we have to keep explaining almost every story that, you know, this is what we thought then, then we thought this, this is why, but now we know that to just to help people keep up and also to be transparent, to kind of fight misinformation by showing how we know what we know and just constantly being transparent about that and how our knowledge is changing. So, you know, what we might have told you a couple of months ago, this is why it's different now. So I think we've got time for one more question. Are there any angles relating to this pandemic and especially the science of this pandemic that you think deserve more discussion? Anything that, I mean, it seems like, you know, we're kind of pickled in it. So we, you know, we're paying attention to everything, but if we can like step back and think about what should get even more attention than it is. Well, I'll take that one first. I mean, I think that I think now, you know, we're talking at the end of June and I think we are sort of at, we've been in this stage for a little while where everyone wants to treat this pandemic as basically over, you know, it's like we've done this. We've put up with this for three months. It's been economically devastating, retired. We want to see our friends. So we're going to act like this is over. And, you know, I think that, you know, we as journalists, I don't want us to sort of be just banging the drum over and over again, but I think we need to just drive home the reasons that we know that it's not over, you know? Like in many places, just a few percent of the community has gotten COVID-19, which means that like 90, 95% of people are completely invulnerable. So, you know, we could go through what we've been through 20 more times effectively with all that death and suffering. Like it's, and also, you know, you know, I live in Connecticut. The rates in Connecticut have dropped amazingly. And I can see people are like, oh, well, okay, with everything's fine then. And yet we need to drive home that the nature of this virus, the epidemiology, is such that it can come shooting back so fast, even in summer and, you know, and once, and in the fall when we are all indoors again, based on what we know about, like you said, about, you know, this being spread in a respiratory way, you know, we've got a long road ahead and we just can't ignore that. And so I think, I mean, that's what I'm hoping that we can get people to keep thinking about, but it's tough when we're in the news business. We want to talk about what's new, that's not new. Like that was true last month and the month before and the month before. So I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Just people don't appreciate, still too many people don't appreciate how deadly this is and how it's not going away and how much more effort it is going to take to make it even be the least bit manageable that we're not doing. We're still not, we don't have the contact tracing. We don't, you know, we're not set up for this. This testing is still kind of weird in some places and the masks, I mean, I think what we keep hitting on is that, you know, masks make a difference if everybody wears masks all the time, when you're among other people, especially indoors, that's the only way we can start to control it. And, you know, just the simple public health messages I think we need to keep hammering on. Yeah, I agree. Actually, if future tests doesn't mind, one more kind of quick question, which might be fun for the audiences, has the pandemic changed how you use social media? Has the pandemic changed how I use social media? Yes, in the sense that I'm much more quick to block people who are sharing really harmful information. I'm like, I don't have time for you, you're gone, goodbye. You know, you are going to kill people, whether you're a human or a robot or some paid agent, I don't want you around at all. So I'm much more swift with that. But I also use social media a lot to share the good information, you know, I'm trying to like just flood the zone with good information. And some of that information's from, you know, governments that know how to do this stuff. Unfortunately, like, you know, we journalists had to step into the breach with data, you know, Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic and his colleagues were just saying like, you know, we don't really know how many tests there are. It's just a basic thing. And so they created this COVID tracking project, which now literally like the federal government relies on rather than doing their own job as the federal government and having authoritative data, they just offloaded on to journalists. And then of course we're called, you know, purveyors of fake news, but anyway, but yeah, I mean that, and so like I will share like, you know, the latest from the COVID tracking project, like where are we with testing? You know, we've just barely gotten to a level of testing that's okay nationwide, barely. And we know that because of these reliable sources. So I try to share the good stuff. I mean, do you have particular methods and practices in the age of pandemic for social media? Yeah, that's what I'm doing too. Just trying to share real information, explain why misinformation is misinformation. And you know, don't believe this, do believe that. And you know, very simple messaging, but I kind of can't get off of it. I, you know, so I have to like shut down Twitter because I'd spend all day just, you know, they call it doom scrolling. So, but, you know, as a journalist, you can justify it. You can say, oh, we're looking for story ideas or we're looking for new voices, which is true. I mean, especially in the last few weeks with the black and STEM and black and Astro and Black Burgers Week and some of the social media campaigns have been really good for amplifying black voices in particular, but, you know, kind of showing a lot of the problems in science and academia in a way that's led to good stories for us that, you know, some are related to coronavirus, I'm not, but it just seems like there's, there's so much more going on in Twitter and it's hard to look away sometimes. Yeah, it's hard to look away all the time. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much. This has been fun. Thanks to everybody who came in for the great questions. Thank you. We'll try to answer, we'll maybe try to answer some more of those questions on Twitter if we can. And I want to thank, thank a future tense for having us and Slate, New America Foundation, Arizona State University and please sign up for other social distancing socials. There'll be another one on Tuesday and there's a whole series of these and they're really fun conversations. I hope you can come to some others. Thanks a lot, everybody. Take care.