Episode 345 – Fred Brown, COVID-19 Coronavirus Data, Science, Projections

Every now and then, we get a little serious... and this is one of those times. This episode isn't really served justice by just listening to it, given the number of graphs, charts, and tables involved during the conversation.  We encourage you to hit our Facebook page at  https://www.facebook.com/ITinTheD/ and catch the video at https://www.facebook.com/ITinTheD/videos/168007971161634/ in order to really get the most out of this episode.  We're joined by Fred Brown, an infectious disease expert with incredible credentials.  We were lucky enough that he gave us well over an hour and a half chatting about the COVID-19 outbreak... where we are, where here really is, and what you can reasonably expect moving forward...     And we are good to go. What is up quarantine land? This is the one and only it and the D show where all the way to episode three 45 we got a phenomenal, we were very lucky to have a phenomenal guest this week. Mr Fred Brown, he's an infectious disease expert. I feel like this is every now and then we get a little serious and I feel like just just, just to keep us on our toes. We have to get a little serious now and again. Oh, and by the way, happy birthday Dave. Thank you. I appreciate it man. Um, but yeah, uh, you made fire when ready and we're looking forward to this week show. Hey, what's going on? How's everybody doing? I think our guests are still asleep with our, this is the one and only it in the D show. We made it all the way to episode three 45 do the math, Dave. So that's Bob's wrong plus 329 to close it. And the D that come to his favor, give us a, like on the socials and subscribe to us everywhere. Buying podcasts are sold yet again, this is usually the point where we tell people about our upcoming events and we don't have any, uh, and, and the reason we don't have any upcoming events is why we have our guest on the show tonight. Uh, so yeah. Uh, I guess without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in and, and talk about God. Uh, I guess the only topic that's dominating conversation these days. Oh, you got yourself muted. Yeah. Oh, you got yourself muted, Fred red, you're on mute. There we go. There you go. I apologize. I'm off and running. Well, thanks for having me, Dave. I appreciate it. Of course. No, I appreciate you taking the time to come in. Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Well, you know, I, and I want to get the word out about, you know, what to expect a little bit with this. I, I've been in this game since 1984 we, uh, I actually helped develop the first, uh, AIDS back, uh, the first AIDS test, uh, with a company called Centocor. And we were lucky enough to find the good development first definitive test for AIDS. And from there, that was a 1986. And then from there I helped develop six or seven more vaccines effective for your guests. They have children, they, most of them have been vaccinated by, by my vaccines in the 1990s that we developed. Uh, and I've been involved with probably seven or eight pandemics. We have, we have an epidemic vote every two years. People don't really realize it because they're able to call them now, but you know, they're reasonably frequent. And so if you think about Ebola coming around twice, and we had Zika virus scare, which I was involved with malaria I've been involved with and failed it three times now. So it's, it's a, it's an interesting game. And, um, you know, what, welcome to my world. I'm looking forward to talking a little bit about it. I want to talk about, go a little bit maybe in the background, like I gave a talk to, uh, the Harvard fellows were interested in, in what was happening and so they asked me to give a presentation and I got a little bit of that here just so people have a little bit of background before we talk about what's going on in Michigan. Okay. So right now I guess I'm, you know, my full set of credentials is that I've been in drug discovery, drug development and vaccine development for, uh, 35 years now. I've developed, uh, 27 major drugs, uh, six vaccines, uh, 13 major diagnostic products. I was head of Roche's portfolio management, a team that was, I was global head of that for several years. And you'll hear a little bit about my experience managing the H five N one epidemic that went into Europe and we just were able to contain that. There'll be, and I've created a tool that I think it'd be helpful for the audience to eventually they can look at and see what we're doing. So what you're saying is that you're not some guy in a mask that I found at Meyer to just, you know, hop on the show. I'm working with Johns Hopkins, so if you guys are looking at that, sadly I helped them. I helped do this. They should put up this, you know this, this clock just so we can watch the virus come up and then come down again at, that'd be fun. All the time you say no, you're one rung below a politician on their knowledge base on infectious disease. That's what he's, he's, he's, he's, he's somewhere underneath a Facebook certified epidemiology expert and a and somewhere above. Fred, let me keep it up. Let me give you some, I just got a quick question. You know, I've lived, you know, we joke around like I call our 2009 vacation to Mexico, the swine flu tour because the swine flu broke and then we didn't know we should be flying home every two years. Something's going on. Bird flu, SARS, you know, you kind of listed off a few of them. Also be bold on all that. Like why, what's different now? Like, why, why this one? Because like again, I don't mind doing all this stuff. The, the government, everybody has us doing it wasn't that, but like I walked into this going, Hey, it's nothing. I've been through this crap. And you know, it's not, it's something, yeah. You know, we, we sorta got caught with this one. Vernor's and Robitussin is not curing this. That's, that's what I, yeah. You know, people keep comparing a little bit to the flu and I'll go into live with why that isn't the case. Um, so with this one, you know, it's funny, we do, we do, uh, we actually do prep work. So when you're up in Asia, we do a lot of prep work and in fact it's called prepare. And every two years we go through a couple of scenarios. And what was interesting was the U S was part of that in the early two thousands we went through the prep work and we had actually, we did so badly that we decided that we, that we should develop a plan for it. And in 2008, nine we put together a plan, part of bushes administration then moved into a balanced nutrition. We thought it was a pretty good plan, but we then it was sort of, well you know, it's not that important but we'll, we'll, we'll wait on it. But what we found out was there a couple of scenarios where we do really, really badly and this particular virus is one of those scenarios. It's human to human transmission. That's the first problem. So let's, you know, we've got a lot of population. People are close together. They traveled together for a global day. So anything that any small population can move in doing an open travel to a and really cause pandemics, that's the first problem. The second problem is mode of transmission. This thing is really infectious. And so as you can start to infect people from, you know, just breathing and coughing, uh, and, and the, and the molecules on the aerosol stay on the air for enough time, up to, up to up to three hours. Actually. Unfortunately that that really is a bad scenario because, you know, if you think about the AIDS virus, it's sexually transmitted. You think about Zika was uh, had a vector of the mosquito and we weren't able to stop it but vector. But here it's just out there. And so it's a, and unfortunately, you know, it's got a, it's got a high kill. It's got a reasonably high kill rate, sort of moderate for fires. It was a hierarchal rate. Equity you would probably die out because it would lose hosts. But this one is just sort of in the, in the perfect area where you kill enough people that are able to survive. Um, and uh, and then we've got the transmission uh, problem. And the transmission problems is a big one cause because we have a lot of asymptomatic carriers in this space. So viruses are getting smarter is what you're saying. Great. That's one. And this guy is hard, great, great vaccines, but we still don't have any back. You know, let's think about the common pole. We've had it for a long time. He was trying to stop it for a long time. And we, it's one of the grownup viruses. We don't, we don't have much against these guys. So we've, we've got a little bit of a wait. So when actually in the end there's, I guess there's a good starting point, cause I've heard people use those terms interchangeably. They say Corona virus, they say covert, they say COBIT 19. They say like, so from, from a science perspective, w w lay that hierarchy out. Absolutely. So this is called the scientific game is SARS co V to a, so it's a Sargent [inaudible], uh, virus. Uh, and we've had, uh, two, uh, epidemics of SARS and virus. One was his first, the first one was SARS. And then we had murders. I was middle East virus, middle East had us set a very high kill rate and luckily died out in middle East. Stars almost got over here, you know, made it all the way through Asia and then all the way to Canada. And then all of a sudden, just sorta, you know, Peter DOE, this one is not petering out. So this is our second Sarz Cove. Uh, and it's Covin 19 because it was founded and 20, 19, uh, we've actually have about seven. It's not, it's not the 19th iteration of it. Like you see all the Facebook memes of that's, yeah, that's, yeah. Oh, so you know, it's a, it's a tough one. And I thought one of the things I could, I should show people is, is, is something about, it's important to understand why we're having so much trouble and what, what, what's, what's funny about, about trying to manage, uh,...