As the number of coronavirus-caused quarantines has spiked across the globe, people are being driven into isolation en masse. In some countries, social distancing measures have been helping, but they also come a little too late.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED science writer Matt Simon about why places like Italy have been hit so hard by the coronavirus and what it could predict as the outbreak ramps up in the US. Then, a conversation with WIRED senior writer Adrienne So about how parents can manage having their children locked at home with them after schools shut down.
Show Notes
Read Matt’s story about how hard the coronavirus has hit Italy here. Read Adrienne’s story about how to entertain young children during a quarantine here. Learn about all the new, new dinosaurs at Curiosity Stream here.
Recommendations
Adrienne recommends Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems. Mike recommends the new podcast Rivals. Lauren recommends the 18-piece Pyrex Simply Store set for saving all your WFH lunches.
Matt Simon can be found on Twitter @mrMattSimon. Adrienne So is @adriennemso. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our consulting executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Toddler's voice: Guys. If you see a bird, it's actually a dinosaur.
[Intro theme music]
Lauren Goode: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, senior writer at WIRED, and I'm here with my cohost, WIRED senior editor Michael Calore.
Michael Calore: Hello, hello.
LG: I guess when I say I'm here with my cohost, I don't actually mean here, because this is the first week that the WIRED Gadget Lab podcast is going totally remote. We're all working from home at this point, as I imagine many of our listeners are as well. Also joining us remotely is WIRED science writer, Matt Simon. Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for being here.
Matt Simon: Sure. Thanks for having me, as always.
LG: Today we are talking about, yes, the coronavirus. It's inescapable at this point. As cases continue to climb here in the US, countries everywhere in the world are feeling the full force of this virus. In Italy, which went on full lockdown last week, they've had a particularly hard time. As of the time of this taping, the country has had 41,000 confirmed cases and 3,400 deaths. Matt, you wrote a story on WIRED.com this week about why the coronavirus has hit Italy so hard. Tell us more.
MS: Yeah, there was a theory, a good theory, up to this point as around the world where you have higher populations of elderly folks. They are the most susceptible seemingly to this virus. Their disease is the most aggressive. But what these researchers did was they dug a little bit deeper into the demographics in Italy, and what they found was that it is, of course, one of the older populations in the world. They're actually second-oldest behind Japan, which predisposes them to this disease.
But also they looked at how older folks might be interacting with younger folks, and they found that through census data, a lot of younger folks tend to work in cities and then commute to live at home with grandparents and parents. When they're interacting with each other in the city, they're perhaps transmitting the virus to each other, and because they're younger, they might not be showing any symptoms. So when they go home, they don't think they're sick. It's at that point where they pass this disease to their elders, which is kind of a devastating finding that it's this family structure that's so strong in Italy that is predisposing them to the worst of the virus.
MC: So Matt, one of the things you mentioned in your story, and you just said it, was that they have the second-highest population of elderly in the world. That's 23 percent in Italy. But the country with the highest percentage of elderly people is Japan, where it's 28 percent of their population, and they didn't see similar sickness rates and similar death rates. Why is that? What's different about the demographics in Japan?
MS: Yeah, so it might be a demographic thing where … I haven't seen any research on this, where younger folks in Japan aren't necessarily interacting with their elders as much as they are in Italy. But I think it would probably have more to do with the way that Japan really … not so much locked down the country, but had a very aggressive response as it spread out of China. So they got an early start on it, of course, in severe contrast to what we have here in the United States. That's what is really worrisome about this finding, is that we don't really know how much the young folks are interacting in this country, because it'll vary by city, state, and county. It's all over the place, and in certain places like Florida, you have a huge population of elderly folks as a retirement haven. So that could also become particularly problematic. We might see the same thing that's happening in Italy happen in Florida in the very near future.
LG: Matt, it seems there's also one small bright spot of news out of Italy, which is that a small town in Northern Italy, near Venice, conducted an experiment where all 3,300 people in town were tested for coronavirus, and a strict quarantine was imposed on infected people in their close contacts. This has reportedly slowed or stopped infections. What do you make of this?
MC: Yeah, that's what we should have been doing very early on here in the United States. First of all, social distancing, which we are still not doing. You might've seen the news in San Francisco doing some shelter in place and people still out running around interacting with each other, playing basketball, that sort of thing. We still are not serious about that sort of isolation here in United States, and quarantine technically goes far beyond that. As you've mentioned in Italy, it's much more of a lockdown. Quarantine specifically is isolating people that you don't necessarily know have the virus but who have been exposed to people who have the virus, and the term isolation is for people you know are uninfected. They themselves are isolated.
MS: But we know that this sort of isolation is our best chance of fighting this. Nobody's actually thinking, "OK, we all go to isolation. We're going to stop the virus in its tracks." The idea is to slow the number of infections, to first of all give hospitals some breathing room. We don't want all these patients showing up en mass to the hospitals in the United States, but also it gives us time to develop treatments and vaccines. So it's about flattening the curve, is what it's called, of new cases. Italy has shown that they have done that very well. South Korea as well has had their cases slowed dramatically, and it's really about this self-isolation that we in America are just still really struggling to come to terms with.
LG: You mentioned earlier in the show that elderly people are highly susceptible to the coronavirus. Some other reports that have come out even more recently suggests that it's not just infecting elderly people, it's also infecting young people, but it seems like there could be some misunderstandins around whether the symptoms are worse in elderly people, whether it's more critical once elderly people are confirmed to have it. Can you talk about that a little bit and sort of help clear that up?
MS: Yeah, so the early indication is, as you mentioned, that elderly people do seem to be suffering the worst from this disease. That's probably because this is very much a respiratory disease, and as you get older you accumulate a lot of inflammation. If you are a smoker, that's also bad. If you're predisposed to pneumonia, that can be bad as well. The idea with younger folks not having such bad symptoms is that their lungs are relatively pristine. They don't have the trauma that you accumulate with air pollution and things like that over your lifetime.
But actually in the past couple of days there has been some more reports of young folks getting very sick. So we're still not entirely sure why this disease affects some people more than others. It does seem to be if you have prior lung disease problems that that could be an issue, but really young folks shouldn't be catching it as bad as they are in these new reports, if that were entirely the case.
MC: On that note, Matt, has there been any reporting or any studying done around what role preexisting conditions play in the fatalities and also in the severity of the infections?
MS: Yeah, I mean, the data is still coming in on so much of this. We're just trying to get a handle on this disease in the United States. But the anecdotal reports are that yes, if you had lung disease problems before, especially if you had pneumonia, you're more predisposed to this disease. But the problem is the dearth of data in the United States, particularly because we just haven't been testing people for the disease, and people could have been falling sick and presenting symptoms that we just didn't recognize as Covid-19, which is what this disease is called. So we're way behind on that, and it would've been extremely helpful to be gathering that data from the very early stages, but we would've had to have had a lot of tests for that, and we still don't have nearly as many tests as we need to really fight this outbreak.
LG: Matt, before we let you go, any last pieces of advice for our listeners?
MS: For God's sake, isolate yourself as best you can. Just do it. It sucks. It's lonely, but people's lives are at stake here. You need to convince your elders to isolate and help them as best you can by bringing them supplies and leave them at their door. That's where this gets really tough, right? We have to take care of ourselves and our elders that need our help, but we're now forced to stay away from them. It's for their own good, and it's for the good of humanity, really. If we don't flatten this curve and keep new cases from popping up, our hospitals are going to get overwhelmed, and then we're going to be in really, really big trouble you the United States.
LG: Thank you for that valuable advice, and thank you for coming on the show this week.
MS: Thanks for having me, and sorry for bringing everybody down.
LG: That's OK. You're doing your job, which is … you're doing some excellent reporting, and I highly recommend that everybody go read Matt's story on WIRED.com, which has been one of our most read stories this week. All right. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we're going to take a look at parenting during a quarantine. Adrienne So is going to join us from our unofficial Portland bureau, and you're not going to want to miss this.
[Break]
LG: Welcome back. Last week on the show we talked about how the pandemic has forced schools across the country to close. That story was focused on college campuses but now many primary and secondary schools are closed as well, which means kids of all ages have joined their parents in self isolation. As I'm sure, many … In fact, you're hearing one of them right now. That is Sionainn and she's joining us on the podcast this week along with her mom Adrienne So, who happens to be a WIRED senior writer dialing in from Portland and you guys on the listening end of this show cannot see our Zoom chat right now, but Sionainn has in fact joined us and she's wearing a fantastic rainbow barrette in her hair. Sionainn, say hi.
Adrienne So: Baby, can you say hi to everybody?
Sionainn Sheehan: Hi!
LG: There you go. Adrienne and Sionainn, thank you so much for joining us.
AS: Yes. Hi, guys.
LG: So Adrienne, this week you wrote a story for WIRED.com called "How To Entertain Your Young Children During a Quarantine," which I think you have experience with. You also happen to be a long time remote worker. You've worked from Portland for a while. So some of these work from home changes are actually familiar territory for you. But how have things changed for you now that your own kids' schools have closed? How are you managing?
AS: Well, my kid's schools closed last week and so my three-year-old Wesley and my five-year-old Sionainn.
SS: No, it's two-year-old Wesley.
AS: Okay, he's turning three in June. He's technically two. But-
LG: I see you have an editor there with you.
AS: He is wandering around somewhere talking to himself. Yeah, it has been … I thought it wasn't going to be that much of a difference because I'm used to working from home, but it's been a little cozy and a little chaotic here over the past couple of days. I've been lucky enough to have a spouse who works from home, so where we're managing, but we'll see what happens when this goes on. Because Portland schools are now closed through April 28th right now.
MC: So are you doing homeschooling officially now?
AS: What has been great is that there are a lot of online resources right now for parents of young kids like we have. Sionainn's been really enjoying her drawing classes, her Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems. Can you tell my friends about the Mo Willems, baby? About your drawing classes?
SS: I'm going to show them my pictures.
AS: You want to show them your pictures?
LG: Oh, this is great. This'll be a nice challenge describing it for the podcast audience. I look forward … No, I look forward to seeing these drawings.
AS: Okay. Yeah. Mo Willems is the children's book writer and illustrator behind Don't Get On the Bus and he's been conducting online lunch doodles that Sionainn has really been enjoying and this is a pigeon. It is fuchsia. Do you want to talk about it, babe?
SS: It's my art class.
AS: Yeah. Yeah. She made it with her art class and there's a lot of online apps and resources right now for parents with young kids, which is not making it precisely easy, but it's easier.
LG: Sionainn, I see that you are … is that a marker that you have there?
SS: It's just a hair marker.
AS: This is a sparkly hair marker. A lot of-
SS: It's turquoise.
AS: It's turquoise.
LG: Wow. That's pretty cool. Can I borrow that sometime?
SS: [Giggles]
LG: She's thinking about it. Understandably. So I have so many questions. I mean, Sionainn, how do you like being home all the time with your mom and dad and your brother?
SS: Love it.
LG: Does she say she loves it?
AS: She loves it. Yeah.
LG: She loves it. Now, Adrienne, this means that for you … I mean, in some ways and for many parents, the walls between work and life and work again have become increasingly porous during this time and you really are, in your case, trying to juggle work as well as the work of teaching your kids. I'm wondering if you have specific advice that you could offer other parents who are in similar situations right now?
AS: Yeah. My first piece of advice for parents who are trying to juggle all this right now is to just relax. I wrote a list of things you could do and keeping a schedule and things other parents are doing to cope, but also I just wanted to let you know that if you feel the need to just turn the TV on for movies all day right now, no one will judge you. This is a totally unprecedented situation. Yeah, no judgment from this corner of the internet on doing whatever you have to do to get through the next weeks. I don't think this is something that any of us anticipated having to do.
SS: [Loud singing]
[Laughter]
AS: Yeah, and we're also really lucky that we test gear for WIRED, so we have a Fire tablet and an iPod touch, which is proving to-
SS: It's a phone! Phone!
AS: Yes. Sionainn calls it her phone and she's using it to FaceTime her friends right now actually. Yeah.
SS: I want it to be a phone.
AS: Well, it's a phone and we used it to FaceTime her best friend Mia yesterday and we're going to be FaceTiming Kadrin today. So that's a really nice way for her to keep in touch with some of the friends from school that she's not able to see right now as we're social distancing. Sionainn is my testing partner actually. We test a lot of kids gear together, so she worked with me to test the Fire kids tablets and now we're testing an iPod touch for kids and it's actually the perfect size for her little hands to FaceTime all her friends right now. So it's really cool.
MC: I've heard from parents who have kids who are a little bit older that they're using Zoom for their classes to connect with their teachers and their classmates and also kids are watching TED talks. I know something that you've been interested in is CuriosityStream. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
AS: Oh my gosh. It's a fabulous purely documentary streaming service. It's curiositystream.com. It's $20 for the year and we are really enjoying every single dinosaur documentary that's ever been made. We we're seeing every episode of Walking With Dinosaurs. We're learning a lot about Microraptors and oculudentavis. Can you tell them about the oculudentavis, baby?
SS: It's a new new dinosaur.
AS: Yeah, it's a new new dinosaur. It's tinier than a hummingbird, right?
SS: Yeah.
AS: Yeah. Sionainn has drawn a bunch of life-sized dinosaurs and taped them up on the walls for a dinosaur garden. So that's been really fun to look at while I'm going to the bathroom.
LG: Adrienne, I wanted to ask you, so what happens at this point if school is just canceled for the remainder of the year? I've seen some parents online calling for changes to grading systems saying maybe we should be doing pass fail or even at the college level at this point, just give students credit for the work they've done so far. How does disruptive could it potentially be if school just does not resume through the end of the school year? What are your thoughts on that?
AS: I think it's really hard for any of us to imagine what things are going to look like childcare wise from one week to the next. Sionainn's and Wes's schools are closed until the end of April and yeah, they're saying in San Francisco that schools are probably going to be out in the fall, so it's blown our minds that it's come this far. Sean and I are both lucky enough to have employers who are pretty flexible and understand that this is an evolving situation, but I think we and a lot of other parents in our situation are just taking things day by day right now. It's hard to plan that far in advance.
LG: Yeah, yeah, for sure. When you talk to your kids about the situation or up until recently, if you were around your friends' kids, how would you talk about what was going on?
AS: For that piece that I did last week? I was lucky enough to talk to Dr. Victor Carrion. He's the director of pediatric anxiety at Stanford and he gave us a lot of great tips on how to talk to your young children during this crisis and I think you guys can tell that Sionainn is not particularly anxious right now. The main thing is making sure that your really young kids know that someone is there to take care of them because they're worried about that more than they are worried about getting really sick. So that's been helpful.
LG: Well, Adrienne and Sionainn, thank you so much for joining us for that segment. We're going to take a quick break and then when we come back we're going to have some recommendations for you, and Adrienne, I think you're going to join us for that, right?
AS: I am.
LG: All right, we'll be right back.
[Break]
LG: All right. Welcome back. It's time for some recommendations. Adrienne, what's your recommendation this week?
AS: My recommendation is Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems that Kennedy Center is streaming 20 to 25 minutes doodling classes with the author of Don't Let the Pigeon Get on the Bus and we're really enjoying those over here.
LG: Amazing. Mike, what's your recommendation?
MC: My recommendation this week is a new podcast from hosts Steven Hyden and Jordan Runtagh. It's part of the iHeartRadio network of shows. It's called Rivals and it's all about different musical rivalries and how they played out. So last week's episode was about Prince and Michael Jackson and their long running rivalry. This week's episode is about Robbie Robertson versus Levon Helm and the breakup of the band. So it basically just charts the history of famous rivalries and you can pick and choose based on what your musical tastes are, but the hosts are really engaging and the show is really excellent. Rivals.
LG: That's a good one. My recommendation this week is the Pyrex Simply Store 18 piece set of Tupperware for $30. You can get it at Walmart.com. Admittedly, this was a recommendation that I found on the Wire Cutter last year on their list of the best Tupperware to buy. But when I was moving late last year, I accidentally received two sets of this Tupperware as a gift from somebody who accidentally put two in the shopping cart online. When I received these two giant boxes of Tupperware, I thought, "What am I possibly going to do with two 18 piece sets of Tupperware?" Now that we're all working from home or quarantined at home and I'm cooking a lot more, it has really come in handy so I am glad I have extra Tupperware right now and I really like this, so Pyrex Simply Store.
MC: Yeah. You know what? I have the same set. I don't have two of them but I have one and I have been using it a lot this last couple of weeks. Anything you can get is good, but the ones with the glass bottoms or the borosilicate glass, the Pyrex ones, are the best.
LG: Yes, they're excellent. All right. That is our show for this week. Thanks, Adrienne, for joining us.
AS: Thanks, Lauren. Do you want to say bye, babe?
SS: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
LG: Bye, Sionainn. And thanks to Matt Simon for joining us earlier and thank you all for listening. We hope that you and your families are staying healthy during this time. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. This show is produced by Boone Ashworth, who gets extra credit this week for dealing with so many remote feeds and dogs and kids and cats and Harleys outside on the street and so many other things that he's going to be editing and sound engineering around this week. Our consulting executive producer is Alex Kapelman. Thanks again and bye for now.
[Outro theme music]
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