“We’re still in the first wave. Everything we’re seeing right now is all first wave. And the way we’re doing this, it may be that there are no waves. We’re just kind of in water up to our neck all year long. We never let the first wave subside, we opened up too early, and large chunks of the country have water up to their neck. And it takes very little to start drowning. And the second wave—the cold weather driving us all indoors, making it hard to slow down the spread of the virus—that feels like a distant problem right now. In the short-run, we’ve just got to get the current, large outbreak that’s affecting more than half of our country under control, and we’ve got to make sure the other half of the country doesn’t go down this path.” – Dr. Ashish Jha, episode 177 on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Dr. Ashish Jha (Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute) joins us this week to give us science-based updates on the global pandemic. We discuss the federal government’s inconsistent approach to COVID-19 (9:40), the truth about transmission rates (13:00), the effect masks can have on numbers country-wide (20:55), the restlessness of the older generation (32:24), predictions of the second wave (36:50), and his hope of overcoming the pandemic (40:24).
Show-notes:
- Follow Ashish on Twitter.
- Learn more about the Harvard Global Health Institute here.
- Listen to Dr. Ashish Jha’s first conversation with us here.
- And our second talk with him, here.
- From The New York Times: How the World Missed COVID-19’s Silent Spread