Epidemic
EPIDEMIC is a weekly series on the science, public health, and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic. We help you understand the latest science and the bigger context, bringing you diverse angles—from history to politics to virology—depth and texture you won’t get elsewhere. Hear from some of the world’s leading infectious disease, public health, and other experts.
Season 1COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic
E57: Disrupting Restaurants Part II / Amanda Cohen, Saru Jayarmana and Pete Ternes
24min | Jan. 14th, 2021“It’s my responsibility as an owner to figure out how to afford to pay ...
Listen To This EpisodeE56: Flattening the Infodemic Curve / Claire Wardle, John Cook, Renee DiResta
22min | Jan. 7th, 2021“That’s the challenge with infodemics: too much information and not kno...
Listen To This EpisodeE55: Mask Up / Linsey Marr, Kim Prather and Delphine Wallis
19min | Dec. 18th, 2020“Masks are absolutely essential because you can’t always control when s...
Listen To This EpisodeE54: A Smarter Way to Quarantine / Roxanne Khamsi and Jeffrey Townsend
18min | Dec. 11th, 2020“If you’re going to be traveling, if you’re going to be in a situatio...
Listen To This EpisodeE53: The Vaccines are Coming / Kizzmekia Corbett, Sree Chaguturu, Julie Rosenberg
24min | Dec. 4th, 2020This, quite frankly, is our generation’s Manhattan project.  –Sree Cha...
Listen To This EpisodeE52: Love and Care in a Pandemic
23min | Nov. 21st, 2020“I was watching the nurses and the doctors and everyone in the healthcare...
Listen To This EpisodeE51: Disrupting Restaurants
25min | Nov. 14th, 2020“Food is not going to solve the world’s problems because food is itself...
Listen To This EpisodeE50: The Post-Pandemic College Experience
21min | Nov. 6th, 2020“There’s this toxic cocktail of low endowment per student, high tuition...
Listen To This EpisodeE49: Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse
23min | Oct. 30th, 2020“We have this long history of seeking personal and individual solutions t...
Listen To This EpisodeE48: A False Promise: Herd Immunity and Herd Mentality
26min | Oct. 23rd, 2020“I would put this in very plain English: The way to protect the vulnerabl...
Listen To This EpisodeE47: A Very Important Patient
25min | Oct. 16th, 2020“What could be more political [than] the determination of whether the pre...
Listen To This EpisodeE46: Vote Like Your Health Depends on It
23min | Oct. 9th, 2020Healthcare is political. There’s a difference between politics and partis...
Listen To This EpisodeE45: In for the Long-haul
25min | Oct. 2nd, 2020“It’s not like the straight trajectory towards recovery…It very feels...
Listen To This EpisodeE44: Science & Public Health Under Attack
23min | Sep. 25th, 2020“Public health is one of the few agencies locally that you can guarantee ...
Listen To This EpisodeE43: What Sports Can Teach Us About Mass Testing
21min | Sep. 18th, 2020“I think it’s a fascinating microcosm of the situation we’re in as a ...
Listen To This EpisodeE42: One on One with Tony Fauci
21min | Sep. 11th, 2020“Right now … we are in the middle of it, [a] very politicized situation...
Listen To This EpisodeE41: Back to Campus
23min | Aug. 4th, 2020“If we want to bring students back to college, we have to redefine what c...
Listen To This EpisodeE40: Back to School / Arne Duncan, Allison Slater Tate, Stephanie Gounder
23min | Jul. 31st, 2020“The goal is not to reopen schools; it’s to keep schools open. And if w...
Listen To This EpisodeE39: Invisible Women / Ai-jen Poo, Susie Rivera, Glewna Joseph
23min | Jul. 28th, 2020“Now that we see them, my hope is that our field of vision about who is w...
Listen To This EpisodeE38: Shoe-Leather Epidemiology
22min | Jul. 24th, 2020“I literally love my job… and being able to wake up and the end of the ...
Listen To This EpisodeE37: Seeking Sanctuary / Julie Levey, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, Pastor Jamal Bryant
27min | Jun. 21st, 2020“I don’t have any plans on returning in the immediate future. I don’t...
Listen To This EpisodeE36: Alone Together / Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Lucy Flamm, Jeff Howe, Jackie Jones
20min | Jul. 17th, 2020“Loneliness is something we hear a lot from individuals in our community....
Listen To This EpisodeE35: What’s Essential Health Care in a Pandemic? / Cecile Richards and Kersha Diebel
21min | Jul. 14th, 2020“…the pandemic has simply highlighted for some people that hypocrisy, w...
Listen To This EpisodeE34: Hands-On / Nicola Corl, Shannon Adams, Latia Curtis
22min | Jul. 10th, 2020“They say, you need to keep a minimum of six feet distance between people...
Listen To This EpisodeE33: The Privilege of Immunity / Kathryn Olivarius, Juanita Mora, Esha Bhandari
22min | Jul. 7th, 2020“An immunity passport system would create a two-tier system because it wo...
Listen To This EpisodeE32: Epidemics Change History / Josh Loomis, Frank Snowdon
26min | Jun. 30th, 2020“Just like cholera exposed the weaknesses in European society, COVID is d...
Listen To This EpisodeE31: A Patchwork Pandemic / Ed Yong, Howard Koh
26min | Jun. 26th, 2020“We all believe that we need a national plan in the face of a national em...
Listen To This EpisodeE30: A Second Wave? / Howard Markel
26min | Jun. 19th, 2020“So when will it come back? You know, I’m a historian, so I’m uncomfo...
Listen To This EpisodeE29: A Magic Bullet? Monoclonal Antibodies / James Crowe
29min | Jun. 16th, 2020“In our case, we’re trying to transfer an antibody from one person to a...
Listen To This EpisodeE28: The Political Psychology of Pandemics / Michele Gelfand, Howard Lavine
34min | Jun. 12th, 2020“In the United States, we have a relatively low threat history. We’re s...
Listen To This EpisodeE27: Convalescent Plasma / Arturo Casadevall, Michael Busch
28min | Jun. 9th, 2020“With penicillin, for example, you needed a few days to begin to get bett...
Listen To This EpisodeE26: Indigenous Peoples / Rebecca Nagle, Melissa Begay, Jamescita Peshlakai
30min | Jun. 5th, 2020“I think there’s always sort of like Indian humor with everything and s...
Listen To This EpisodeE25: A COVID Vaccine / Seth Berkeley, Peter Hotez
33min | Jun. 3rd, 2020“Terrible diseases like smallpox, polio, yellow fever where, you know, th...
Listen To This EpisodeE24: Is the CDC MIA? / Jim Curran, Mark Rosenberg
31min | May. 29th, 2020“I think there are some people who are afraid that the truth will hurt th...
Listen To This EpisodeE23: Our Immune System versus the Virus / Stanley Perlman, Jon Yewdell
21min | May. 26th, 2020“Antibodies are the easiest part of the immune system to measure. It’s ...
Listen To This EpisodeE22: A False Choice: The Economy versus Public Health / Rashad Robinson, Alicia Garza, Marshall Ganz
23min | May. 22nd, 2020“Every night… we are literally cheering and clapping and beeping our ho...
Listen To This EpisodeE21: Are Antibodies the Holy Grail? / Kaitlyn Sadtler, Matt Memoli
25min | May. 19th, 2020“A lot of people don’t realize this, but there are other cold-inducing ...
Listen To This EpisodeE20: Not Business as Usual / Geoff Baird, Celine Gounder
32min | May. 15th, 2020“Still, like 90% of our patients are COVID patients. This is still not no...
Listen To This EpisodeE19: A Return to Sports, a Return to “Normal” Life?
25min | May. 12th, 2020“I can’t stress this enough. Rudy Gobert testing positive was the best ...
Listen To This EpisodeE18: Without Shelter in a Storm / Rosanne Haggerty, Jake Maguire, Cindy Funkhouser
16min | May. 12th, 2020“It’s scary for everybody, but imagine yourself being someone that canâ...
Listen To This EpisodeE17: Getting Prepared / John Lynch, Syra Madad, Reid Wilson
21min | May. 5th, 2020“We want to make sure everybody’s prepared because we know COVID 19 is ...
Listen To This EpisodeE16: Good and Bad Bosses / Adam Grant, William Kassler, Katie McGrath
28min | May. 1st, 2020“We’re not working from home because we want to. Many of us are working...
Listen To This EpisodeE15: Health Coverage in a Pandemic / Donald Berwick, Karen Pollitz
38min | Apr. 28th, 2020“COVID-19 is the great revealer. It’s showing every crack and fault in ...
Listen To This EpisodeE14: Disability Shouldn’t Be A Liability / Maggie Hassan, Rebecca Cokley
27min | Apr. 24th, 2020“Resources that we’ve been using as reasonable accommodations are now b...
Listen To This EpisodeE13: A Black Plague / Helene Gayle, Aletha Maybank
22min | Apr. 21st, 2020“As a nation, we’ve got to put in place a public health system that inc...
Listen To This EpisodeE12: Covid and Punishment
24min | Apr. 17th, 2020“There’s no social distancing in the prisons, almost no protective gear...
Listen To This EpisodeE11: Surviving COVID / David Lat
29min | Apr. 14th, 2020“The other point I made about ventilators is, they’re not a panacea. Ma...
Listen To This EpisodeE10: Dr Tony Fauci: From One Pandemic to Another
24min | Apr. 10th, 2020“I mean, many of us spent the whole ‘80’s in a state of terror, knowi...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 9: Did Anybody See This Coming? / Juliette Kayyem
25min | Apr. 6th, 2020“It’s not an on/off switch. We are living with coronavirus until we get...
Listen To This EpisodeEp. 8: Unequal: Race, Status, and COVID-19
32min | Apr. 3rd, 2020“People who don’t have access to medical care, people who don’t have ...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 7: The Destiny of Nations Depends on How They Feed Themselves
27min | Mar. 31st, 2020“I think today we are going to be doing roughly 125,000 meals across Amer...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 6: We All Count: Civil Rights & Coronavirus
30min | Mar. 27th, 2020“The nation is confronting this kind of social distancing and quarantine ...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 5: On the Frontlines and in People’s Minds / Adam Grant
32min | Mar. 24th, 2020“I have to say it’s really weird to be at Bellevue right now. On the on...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 4: Our Health System’s in Trouble
34min | Mar. 20th, 2020“I think as we get testing capability out, and we get the ability to trea...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 3: Flatten the Curve
34min | Mar. 13th, 2020“The goal is to try to keep as many people from being infected for as lon...
Listen To This EpisodeE2: The Test Kit Debacle
33min | Mar. 5th, 2020Our special guest this week is Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the ...
Listen To This EpisodeEp 1: Do we need a coronavirus czar?
32min | Feb. 28th, 2020“We cannot build a wall, a real wall, or a metaphorical wall to keep this...
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Speaking Truth to COVID / Stacey Abrams
30min | Apr. 25th, 2020“We are not ready to put at risk the lives of those who are going to be o...
Listen To This EpisodeA False Dichotomy: Airborne versus Droplet, Roxanne Khamsi, Lydia Bourouiba
40min | Mar. 20th, 2020On March 14, 2020, Roxanne Khamsi published an article in Wired magazine: T...
Listen To This EpisodeRunning Out of Time / Michael Donnelly
35min | Mar. 20th, 2020Michael Donnelly is a professional data scientist, policy researcher, and e...
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