{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#77 – Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":5825,"description":"In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — Director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics — abruptly found himself a global celebrity, his social media following growing 40-fold and journalists knocking down his door, as everyone turned to him for information they could trust.\r\n\r\nHere he lays out where the fight against COVID-19 stands today, why he's open to deliberately giving people COVID-19 to speed up vaccine development, and how we could do better next time.\r\n\r\nAs Marc tells us, island nations like Taiwan and New Zealand are successfully suppressing SARS-COV-2. But everyone else is struggling.\r\n\r\nLinks to learn more, summary and full transcript.\r\n\r\nEven Singapore, with plenty of warning and one of the best test and trace systems in the world, lost control of the virus in mid-April after successfully holding back the tide for 2 months.\r\n\r\nThis doesn't bode well for how the US or Europe will cope as they ease their lockdowns. It also suggests it would have been exceedingly hard for China to stop the virus before it spread overseas.\r\n\r\nBut sadly, there's no easy way out.\r\n\r\nThe original estimates of COVID-19's infection fatality rate, of 0.5-1%, have turned out to be basically right. And the latest serology surveys indicate only 5-10% of people in countries like the US, UK and Spain have been infected so far, leaving us far short of herd immunity. To get there, even these worst affected countries would need to endure something like ten times the number of deaths they have so far.\r\n\r\nMarc has one good piece of news: research suggests that most of those who get infected do indeed develop immunity, for a while at least.\r\n\r\nTo escape the COVID-19 trap sooner rather than later, Marc recommends we go hard on all the familiar options — vaccines, antivirals, and mass testing — but also open our minds to creative options we've so far left on the shelf.\r\n\r\nDespite the importance of his work, even now the training and grant programs that produced the community of...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}