Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day seventeen since
Speaker 1: coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Cases in the United
Speaker 1: States soared to more than eighty five thousand, making the
Speaker 1: US the world leader in COVID nineteen cases on today's episode,
Speaker 1: The Coronavirus Detectives. But first, here are the top stories
Speaker 1: from today. The US Senate passed a historic two trillion
Speaker 1: dollar relief package late on Friday morning, which promises to
Speaker 1: deliver payments and benefits to individuals, businesses, and states affected
Speaker 1: by the pandemic. Italy had its deadliest twenty four hours,
Speaker 1: recording almost one thousand fatalities from the virus in one day.
Speaker 1: Spain's death rate also soared. Cases are jumping in the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom and the US raised past China to become
Speaker 1: the country with the most cases in the world. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: in China, where the outbreak began, virtually all the latest
Speaker 1: cases came from people arriving from overseas, prompting the government
Speaker 1: to temporarily suspend the entry of foreigners with valid visas
Speaker 1: and residence permits in the US. A deal to produce
Speaker 1: life saving ventilators that a massive scale faltered as President
Speaker 1: Donald Trump attacked manufacturers. Carmakers General Motors, and Ford, as
Speaker 1: well as medical device manufacturer Ventech Life Systems, were set
Speaker 1: to ramp up production of the breathing machines, waiting on
Speaker 1: the Trump administration to place orders and cut checks, but
Speaker 1: then the President published a series of angry tweets accusing
Speaker 1: GM of moving too slowly and charging too much, calling
Speaker 1: on the company to produce the machines in an Ohio
Speaker 1: plant it no longer owns. Later, GM said it would
Speaker 1: stop waiting on a federal contract and produce the machines
Speaker 1: at an Indie, Yana plant. GM says it can eventually
Speaker 1: ramp up to making as many as one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: ventilators per day. Other carmakers are contributing to the effort
Speaker 1: to mass produce badly needed supplies. Toyota is planning to
Speaker 1: use its shut down car plants in the US to
Speaker 1: make masks and face shields. The company said it would
Speaker 1: start producing these items early next week to supply hospitals
Speaker 1: near its plants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Texas. It's
Speaker 1: also finalizing deals with medical supply companies to make ventilators
Speaker 1: and respirator hoods. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reported on
Speaker 1: Friday that he had tested positive for COVID nineteen and
Speaker 1: with suffering symptoms including a fever and persistent cough. The
Speaker 1: United Kingdom is seeing an overall surge in cases with
Speaker 1: deaths from the virus jumping. And now for our main story,
Speaker 1: the coronavirus detectives. If you wanted to learn everything you
Speaker 1: could about an organism, a good place to start would
Speaker 1: be its genome. The genome is the complete set of
Speaker 1: genetic information found in the d n A of any
Speaker 1: and every organism, whether that's a human being, a plant,
Speaker 1: or even a virus. And inside hundreds of viral genomes
Speaker 1: from patients around the globe there may be clues to
Speaker 1: where the infection came from and, most importantly, where it's
Speaker 1: going next. A little known geneticist in Seattle has become
Speaker 1: something of a c s I detective unraveling the origins
Speaker 1: of COVID nineteen in the US. Could his research hold
Speaker 1: secrets to a better understanding of the disease. Some policy
Speaker 1: makers seem to think so. I talked to Bloomberg's Bob
Speaker 1: lang Grath for more scientists around the world have been
Speaker 1: trying to analyze COVID nineteen figure out exactly where this
Speaker 1: vibe came from. And you've been talking to one of
Speaker 1: these scientists, Trevor Bedford, and I was just hoping you
Speaker 1: could tell us a little bit about his research just
Speaker 1: to start off. So he is one of a he's
Speaker 1: at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research gener and he's one
Speaker 1: of a new breed of epidemiologists that doesn't do kind
Speaker 1: of the shoe leather work this traditional epidemiologists, which is
Speaker 1: tracking all the cases and finding other contacts. Instead, you know,
Speaker 1: he kind of sits by the laptop with a handful
Speaker 1: of collaborators around the world and waits for new UH
Speaker 1: genome data genome sequencing data from patients that have had
Speaker 1: the virus for it to come in. So he analyzes
Speaker 1: the genome data over time to see, you know, how
Speaker 1: the virus is muted, and that gives some clues as
Speaker 1: to you know, how it is spreading, where is it
Speaker 1: coming from, and what places are starting to have new
Speaker 1: clusters next, So how can scientists predict where these clusters
Speaker 1: go and how they travel. You can think of its
Speaker 1: sort of like a genetic family trees of the virus.
Speaker 1: As the virus spreads from one person to the next
Speaker 1: to the next, there are occasional small mutations in the
Speaker 1: virus and uh, you know, most of these mutations, they
Speaker 1: don't change how your sycomics people, or don't change anything
Speaker 1: functional about the virus, but they do allow the genetic detectives,
Speaker 1: the kind of genome genetic detectives as I like to
Speaker 1: call them, uh, to kind of track the virus in
Speaker 1: near real time. And his one of his big breakthroughs
Speaker 1: came three or four weeks ago at a time when
Speaker 1: a lot of people in public health authorities in the
Speaker 1: US thought we had a kind of mostly under control.
Speaker 1: And as he was analyzing genomes in the virus case
Speaker 1: it was detected in a teenager in Washington, one of
Speaker 1: the first community cases. He found that it was almost
Speaker 1: identical to the virus in the very first Washington case
Speaker 1: in January, and that indicated to him very strongly, to
Speaker 1: Dr Bedford, that the community spread in Washington was closely
Speaker 1: linked to that first Washington case in January, and in fact,
Speaker 1: it had been spreading undetected in Washington for quite a
Speaker 1: few weeks. So basically it was a kind of early
Speaker 1: alarm signal you can get by tracking these viral genomes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm hoping perhaps that this might actually help us
Speaker 1: predict where the virus is going next and perhaps how
Speaker 1: long it will last. Are there elements to his research
Speaker 1: that give us some indication to that extent as well.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't predict whether someone is going to
Speaker 1: get on a plane uh and flat to some new
Speaker 1: destination or sneak into some new destination and then that
Speaker 1: patient is sick and spreads the virus. It can't really
Speaker 1: predict that. But what what it's very good at doing
Speaker 1: this genetic work is kind of piecing together seemingly outbreaks
Speaker 1: and case clusters that may appear on the surface to
Speaker 1: be unrelated because these patients that got sick around the
Speaker 1: same time in one geographic area like in Washington, you
Speaker 1: didn't have any obvious contacts or points of contact. But
Speaker 1: when you look at the genetics and looks very similar,
Speaker 1: that gives you an indication the fact might be related
Speaker 1: and and might have derived from some of the same
Speaker 1: original index cases and that so it's kind of an
Speaker 1: early warning signal that helps supplement traditional epidemiology method that
Speaker 1: seems to be a really important element of the fact
Speaker 1: that Dr Bedford isn't working alone but with this global team,
Speaker 1: and that the global team really allows him to get
Speaker 1: this almost real time data about where the virus came from,
Speaker 1: the details of how it's spreading. How is he sinking
Speaker 1: up with this team that scattered essentially across the globe.
Speaker 1: Trevor Bedford is at in Seattle at the fred Hut
Speaker 1: Cancer Center and one of his main collaborators is at
Speaker 1: the Universe of Bosel, Switzerland, So and that's a nine
Speaker 1: hour time difference. And then as it happens, he also
Speaker 1: has another researcher in his lab who's from New Zealand
Speaker 1: and apparently got I wanted to go back to New Zealand,
Speaker 1: so that researcher, as luck would have it, is working
Speaker 1: you know, from home in New Zealand. So they have
Speaker 1: as it turns out, even though it's a small group
Speaker 1: of people, they have people in three very disparate time zones.
Speaker 1: That kind of allows them to you know, get an
Speaker 1: analyzed data and almost real time as it comes in.
Speaker 1: And how exactly are they sharing the data? Is this
Speaker 1: publicly available? Can any would go and see the real
Speaker 1: time research. Dr Bedford and his collaborators they have software
Speaker 1: there was basically ready to go already. They've been working
Speaker 1: on this for a while, they and so they've for influenza,
Speaker 1: for a Bowl and for other outbreaks. So they basically
Speaker 1: it's software ready to go that can analyze and compare
Speaker 1: the different viruses and how they've mutated, you know, very
Speaker 1: quickly that can you give us some results in twenty
Speaker 1: to thirty minutes. So they have a website, a interactive
Speaker 1: website called next train dot org and that is updated,
Speaker 1: you know, frequently with new viral data as it comes in.
Speaker 1: And they literally put up like these little I call
Speaker 1: virus family trees that the technical name is bhilogenies. But
Speaker 1: they show like a different you know, clusters of virus
Speaker 1: and you know, how they've mutated over time, and like
Speaker 1: what parts of the world they've come from. And so
Speaker 1: it's a powerful technique. It provides you know, circumstantial not
Speaker 1: definitive evidence, but circumstantial, very strong, circumstantial evidence for how
Speaker 1: the virus spread and which towns it has come from
Speaker 1: and gone to. But it's not just this website. Dr
Speaker 1: Bedford seems to have become a bit of a social
Speaker 1: media filipper by sharing his work online. Dr Bedford is
Speaker 1: a very good at using Twitter u and these Twitter threads.
Speaker 1: You know, he now has more than a hundred seventy
Speaker 1: thousand Twitter followers. It was pretty amazing from someone who know,
Speaker 1: previously was an obscure computational biologist, you know, known to
Speaker 1: people in his field, but you know, not outside his
Speaker 1: very technical field. And now he's being followed by public
Speaker 1: health experts around the world, including former FDA commissioners, as
Speaker 1: being kind of one of the most prescient commentators, you know,
Speaker 1: And what's happening with this virus, how do you see
Speaker 1: maybe policymakers starting to use and apply Bedford's work more
Speaker 1: broadly again to hopefully stop the spread of the virus
Speaker 1: more generally. Yes, he is, uh, he told me he
Speaker 1: was in regular contact with people are both at the
Speaker 1: CDC and the public health authorities in his state, Washington,
Speaker 1: because obviously Washington was the first state to be heavily
Speaker 1: hit by the coronavirus in the in the US obviously
Speaker 1: it's been now surpassed by New York. So he's in
Speaker 1: regular contact with you know, public health authorities and basically
Speaker 1: although they're putting all the data out there. I mean,
Speaker 1: it is the genome data is it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a new thing for epidemiologists that traditionally trained epidemiologists, you know,
Speaker 1: might not have as much expertise and interpreting it. And
Speaker 1: so he's in regular contact with the health authorities, you know,
Speaker 1: to tell him, hey, here's what I think this means
Speaker 1: this new set of data. You know, here's what you
Speaker 1: make of it, Here's what you think of it. So
Speaker 1: he's regularly talking to to the various health authorities. Bob Blankra,
Speaker 1: thank you very much, great, thank you, And that's it
Speaker 1: for the Prognosis Daily Edition. For more on the coronavirus
Speaker 1: crisis from a hundred and twenty bureaus around the world,
Speaker 1: visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you appreciate
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Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is
Speaker 1: hosted by me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by
Speaker 1: me To for Foreheads, Orton Gospore, and Magnus Henriksen. Reporting
Speaker 1: by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo sidron Our editors
Speaker 1: are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesca Levie is Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: head of podcasts,