The coronavirus outbreak is accelerating in the United States. According to projections, the number of Covid-19 cases in the US is expected to peak around the middle of April. Meanwhile, medical practitioners at hospitals and other health facilities across the country face a shortage of life-saving medical equipment. Without enough ventilators, masks, and tests, the task of dealing with the coming surge in patients becomes significantly more challenging.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers comes on the show to talk about medical supply shortages, why there's so much conflicting information about whether people should wear masks, and how a global crisis changes the way we communicate.
Read Adam and Megan Molteni’s story about the math behind predicting the course of the coronavirus here. Read Lauren’s story about email etiquette during a pandemic here. Read Tom Simonite’s story about the shortage of masks here. Read Gregory Barber’s story about how hospitals are preparing to deal with equipment shortages here. Follow all of WIRED’s coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic here.
Adam recommends the show Community. Mike recommends the Houseparty app (provided you hobble its data-collection abilities). Lauren recommends the HBO series The Wire.
Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Adam Rogers: Forgive yourself. Remember to forgive yourself.
Lauren Goode: Thank you. Forgive. OK.
[Intro theme music]
LG: Hi everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED. And I'm here with my cohost, WIRED senior editor Michael Calore.
Michael Calore: Hello. Hello.
LG: Hello.
MC: I'm over here though.
LG: I was just going to say … Rather, I should probably start saying, "And over there, in a different home, is WIRED senior editor Michael Calore." We are recording this remotely for the third week in a row. So if it sounds a little bit different, that is why. We hope that you'll forgive and that you will still get some helpful information from this podcast. Also, joining us remotely is WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers. Adam, thanks for being here.
AR: I'm grateful that we are all able to see each other's faces in tiny boxes. I miss you all.
LG: Yes, that is how Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the way we're working, the way we're communicating, and of course it's changed a lot more than that too. So later on in the show, we're going to talk about the ways that Covid-19 has changed how we're communicating, from the tone of emails to how we're using video chats. But first, on the podcast today we're going to take a look at the shortage of medical equipment in the US.
For weeks now, medical practitioners at hospitals and other facilities have said that they don't have enough masks, ventilators, tests, things that they need to combat the spread of the virus and to treat it. So we want to talk about how doctors and nurses are struggling to cope with the lack of resources, especially since the peak of this pandemic is currently expected to come sometime around mid April. And we want to talk about why we've ended up in this situation. So we've brought Adam on to help us make sense of this. Adam, how would you describe the current state of available medical equipment in the US?
AR: Desperate but separated. All eyes are on New York City right now as a hot spot of the pandemic. But the expectation from modelers and from public health experts is that that will move to encompass other places. Either it will peak in New York this week or at the end of this week or the beginning of next, or that it will stay in New York and move to other places as well. And where that is, you can use different metrics to try to guess, predict, model, be informed about where that might happen. But what that means is that none of those places have …
If things are at their worst, and without social distancing measures, and the ways that we try to slow this down to, as everyone now says, flatten those curves, that there are not enough hospital beds, enough critical care beds, enough ventilators for people whose lungs can't breathe on their own, enough personal protective equipment, PPEs, for health care workers who are supposed to change their respirators or N95 mask to the level of filtration that we can talk about, and eye protection, and face shields, and scrubs, and virus-proof clothes basically with every patient, every time they do it. So the usage is, you get thousands and thousands of patients runs into the tens of thousands of stuff, and nobody was prepared for that.
MC: You know, we have heard a lot from federal officials lately about the national stockpile and the status of the national stockpile. Can you tell us briefly what is the national stockpile, and why does it not have enough stuff for everybody?
AR: I may get some of this history wrong, but it is certainly true that after September 11, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and then the anthrax attacks—the sending by mail of anthrax to places in Washington and elsewhere—that people who made these federal policies for preparedness started to do all sorts of tabletop exercises, what you would call a war game, to try to understand what the needs would be, if something like this really broke big, if there was a large-scale respiratory infection that spread globally or through the United States. And mostly they were looking at bioweapons and terrorists doing this intentionally. But the effect, once the outbreak starts, it moves the same way. And what they found immediately was the resources weren't there.
So, in the interest of being prepared for any of national disaster or international disasters, the government started stockpiling stuff. And especially for respiratory outbreak, that stuff were things like PPEs and ventilators. So I have reports. I've been looking back at my own—I've been covering this stuff for a long time, and I've been looking back at my own files. And I have reports of these exercises, of these warnings. There was a report of Johns Hopkins called Dark Winter at one point. They all sound really scary, rightly, and they all say the same things. There's no central command, there's not enough equipment.
We have to put this stuff in a warehouse and be ready. And so, at various times the government, federal government, has spent the money to stockpile stuff, to have big warehouses full of things. And over the last 10 years, that emphasis has started to fade somewhat. And then certainly in the last three, this administration, the Trump administration, has not seen that apparently as much of a priority. So, for example, The New York Times broke the story that many of the ventilators, which we don't have enough of, but the ventilators that were in that national stockpile weren't maintained, that the contract elapsed and they weren't being maintained, so they have to be fixed. And this is all like we're housing tons and tons of stuff.
It's costly and it requires maintenance, and it's boring, and nobody can tell you're doing it when you don't need them. And it happens at a time when almost every other manufacturing and service process is all adjusting time now. It's operating on these very thin, if any, margins of not just like, you don't have warehouses full of stuff. You keep a supply chain moving. And so maintaining warehouses full of stuff is like the boring work of government, and it hasn't been done to the extent that something like this would have necessitated, even though there was signal out there.
There've been two outbreaks of respiratory coronaviruses internationally in the last 20 years. Right? There was SARS and there was MERS. The international public health community saw those and said, "We know what's going to happen. This is how it's going to look. It's going to come out of China, and it's going to move internationally before we can get ahead of it unless we do certain things." And what it begins to look like is, we haven't done them, or we did them and then we let them lapse.
LG: Adam, another story that The New York Times published was about basically how big business affected ventilator manufacturing over the past several years. There was this small Southern California company that was commissioned by the US government to make ventilators in the early 2010s following the H1N1 outbreak. And then there was an acquisition from a multibillion-dollar medical device company. The project was stalled. And it's just feels like increasingly, we're seeing cracks exposed in big business and privatized health care. Which makes me wonder, where should the very urgent solutions for ventilators actually come from right now? Should it be coming from the government, should it be coming from the private sector? Who should we be looking to for leadership in terms of making the ventilators and making the ones we already have work?
AR: I think if you had asked me that in our cafeteria back when we were still allowed to be in person with each other, back before all this had started, probably all of us would have a slightly different answer to that question depending on our priors and our politics. I think that when you're in the midst of a pandemic, as we are, I think some of them would be hard-pressed to say that the motive of who can do this. Who can make a ventilator the cheapest and then charge the most for it. That's preposterous at this moment to me. So what that requires is that then, you have to have some central authority come in and nationalize a production cycle. And that's really something that we just have walked away from that whole idea in this country for a lot of different reasons.
And again, even the three of us could argue about what those reasons are and whether they're right or wrong. But this is the moment where things are post to flip. And so, people who will remark on how … Well, in World War II, all of the production lines for cars turned over to making ships and fighter planes or bombers and stuff. And it's true although that took a long time and the manufacturing methods were very different, it's very difficult now to imagine a car maker changing its assembly lines to make ventilators. Now, look, some company like Ford has said it's going to, I guess. And it's very easy to imagine that some of the same parts are shared in common, and that manufacturers can make sure that the parts could get to the people who make ventilators.
But because there are 50 states who all need these things, because public health is largely run by the states, not at the federal level when it's not emergency, and because there are a bunch of different companies and who all have different needs, someone has to set those priorities. And that's a centralization. To me, it seems very obvious, that what's supposed to happen is a federal entity is supposed to say, clearly, we need tens of thousands of ventilators. And they're going to have to be in one place, and then they're going to have to be in another place. So we need to have them made and then moved and then moved again. Somebody has to be in charge of that. And right now, it seems like nobody is.
MC: So what about the little guy in this scenario? In the past few days, we've seen a lot of people online sharing open source designs for ventilators and other types of hospital equipment. People with 3D printing machines, people who own CNC mills, people who are just really good with machines feel like they can help, and they have been helping. Is this going to help ease the pressure?
AR: Well, first of all it's, it is wonderful, and very entrepreneurial and American in the best sense when you see somebody who says, "I'm an engineer and I know how to make stuff. Let me help. I want to help." That's awesome. Right? But it also does run up against some of the same obstacles that have happened again and again as the way we currently think about technological innovation and how it's funded, has run into trying to work in the biosciences, which is that what you really don't want to do is have a half-baked beta out in the world trying to save somebody's life. Because it'll work as often as a beta does, which means people will die.
So, for example, the early efforts of people saying like, "Well, I can 3D-print stuff. Why don't I just make more masks?" And it became quickly apparent that, well, masks are actually really complicated, and they're really … N95 masks have to be made by people with really giant, big assembly lines because there's approvals and licensing, but also because the filtration textile is a melt-blown, non-woven polypropylene that's made on giant electrical looms that blow it out into the world and let it electrostatically self-assemble. That's not something that you do on a CNC mill, much less, inserting that into a mask that then has to have certain … certain regulations so that it doesn't allow pathogens to pass through it.
And that's true for PPEs, and that's certainly true for ventilators. They're supposed to keep people breathing, and have to be reliable at a certain level, and have certain oxygen and partial pressures and all the things that keep somebody alive are hard to make. And you also want them to be regulated. They can't just be, well, I made one. I'll bring my own DIY ventilator to the hospital, if I have to go there. You don't want that. So how then do those people whose hearts are in the exact right place then get to help? And I don't know that anybody's figured that out really yet except that they start to spontaneously self-assemble themselves into larger and larger units, who can then provide resources, who can maybe help figure out easier designs.
And this was all stuff that was supposed to happen before there was actually a pandemic going on. Part of the project that Lauren mentioned was to actually make a simpler-to-use, simpler-to-operate, simpler-to-transport and store ventilator. That was what that small company was doing. The government was trying to do it and they got … The implication of that story was they got crushed by a larger company that didn't want the competition.
LG: To get back to masks really quickly before we take a break, there's been a lot of conversation around whether or not we should all be wearing masks. Unfortunately, we're in a position right now. We're in one of the richest countries in the world and we don't have the masks that we need, but there are a lot of homemade efforts being made right now. And so, I'm wondering how effective homemade masks are. Are they better than nothing? Should people be fashioning these at home? What should we do at this point?
AR: Well, you were probably part of some of the conversations on the WIRED Slack about that as we were preparing to, and then ran Ferris Jabr's story about how to think about homemade masks, masks that are either surgical masks or even ones that you make at home that are like a surgical mask. It may have some interfacing between two layers of fabric. And the science on … I think everybody acknowledges that the N95 ought to be for the health care workers, but then the surgical masks … Well, there's a shortage of those too and those should be for health care workers too. But if there was a way to have masks at home, you'd make them yourself, that didn't cause a shortage, maybe that would do something.
And the question is, does that keep you from coughing virus onto people if you are unknowingly infected, because so much of the infection seems now to be spread by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, or does it protect you from people who have it? That seems probably not to be the case. But then you get into a lot of very complicated science about how large the droplets are that have the virus in them, and how far they go, and what they can get through and what they can't, and how long you can have a mask on, and whether taking a mask on and off makes you more likely to actually have the particle of the virus get into your mucous membranes versus not messing with the mask at all and just washing your hands a lot? And that's all science that is … to my eye … and many of my learned colleagues disagree with me in either direction. To my eye, that science is, let us say, still in progress. It is equivocal. And people are saying things like, well, maybe it helps a little. And so anything that helps a little is what we should be doing as long as it doesn't hurt. But I do think there's some possibility that it hurts too, that some people are increasingly likely to be infected because they're fiddling with a mask or are not wearing it right. So what's going to happen here is this social forces are about to take over. Los Angeles's mayor has advised people to wear masks that they make themselves when they go outside. There are other places where those orders are coming down.
There's a sense that some of the areas, parts of Asia, that have been more successful in dealing with the pandemic are also places where culturally people wear masks out, and so maybe that was one of the factors. So I have a feeling that the cultural mode is about to get ahead of the science in some respects. My colleague Maryn McKenna, who's one of the great outbreak reporters working today has called that protection theater … Protection cosplay, I'm sorry, is what Maryn referred to it as. And it's possible but that's what it is. But who doesn't love a cosplayer?
LG: All right. On that note, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about etiquette during a pandemic. Not having to do with masks, but having to do with your digital communications.
[Break]
LG: Welcome back to Gadget Lab. I hope you're well. I hope you're doing well and that you and your family are healthy in these unprecedented times. If you have an email account, chances are you've seen that phrase about a million times by now. The pandemic has changed how people are communicating, whether it's with your friends or a colleague or really a virtual stranger. And an email that might've taken two minutes to write off pre-pandemic now takes a lot longer as you're trying to work out the right balance of sincerity, professionalism, acknowledging what's going on. And it led me to wonder this week whether or not our emails have fundamentally changed. OK. So Mike, I'm going to toss this to you for a second. Admit it, you've written some emails that sound like this over the past few weeks?
MC: I have. And as a person who is already like a chronic oversharer on digital communications, I tend to be a little bit long-winded. But I do feel like when the first couple of weeks happened, we were all wishing each other well, overly wishing each other well, over email and even over Slack. But that seems to have cooled off a little bit in the last … At least this week, I feel like it's cooled off. We're all adjusting to the new normal. But you tell me Lauren, because you wrote the story about this this week.
LG: Yeah, so I was noticing over the past few weeks that I was receiving a lot more emails that had some type of well wish or acknowledgement of coronavirus in the beginning. I noticed that I was sending them. I saw on Twitter that people were starting to either gripe about the emails that they were getting or they were showing appreciation for the fact that people were sending them well wishes. One of my favorite tweets was from a Yale student who wrote, "Emails now be like, I hope you're staying safe, sheltered in place, stocked with toilet paper, healthy during these absolutely unprecedented, wild, chaotic, terrifying times. Just wanted to follow up."
Which is another thing too that we have to acknowledge that even though people are sending their best thoughts via email right now, email is still a tool that we use to get stuff done in a lot of cases. Sometimes you hear you're on personal threads. One person I spoke to for this story said he's on personal threads that he's finding really comforting during this time, and those are a little bit different. But for the most part, many of us are using email to conduct business. And so we're seeing more and more of these caveats being thrown in like, I just want to acknowledge that I am aware of what's going on and put this into perspective, but I still need to get this thing done.
AR: Well look, people are still trying to sell stuff to people now and that's weird for a lot of reasons. But I say this all the time. The central insight of disaster sociology and thinking about how human beings behave in times of disaster, which is where we're at, is that they help each other. We come together. And no matter how much elite panic you let yourself see of like, Oh, I'm worried about riots. And gun sales have gone up, and I'm going to hoard toilet paper, and all these things that are bad, the truth is that human beings seek even more connection than we usually do in the unprecedented times, like the ones that we're in, because of course they are unprecedented, and that's what happens, and we're better than we think. I have found myself overly emotive with people with whom I have professional relationships but no more than that and them too. And I think that that's good. We should be talking about how this hurts, because it does hurt.
LG: It does. And one of the things I've noticed … Adam, I don't know if you've experienced this, or Mike, but that it's a way of extending or emphasizing the relationships you already had in place. So some people I spoke to for this story, in particular, the creator of Ruby on Rails questioned the authenticity of people and brands sending emails like this right now. But I have found that if you already had a really personal relationship with somebody or you had a very positive working relationship with them where you didn't always talk about business or the thing that you were tackling together, you sometimes would talk about your lives and share these personal moments, that when they send best wishes or hope you're well and healthy, via email, it comes across as more sincere in some ways than somebody who you've had no interaction with beforehand or a brand or business you really have no connection to sending you a more emphatic email. In those cases, it tends to feel a little bit more like a boiler plate. Whereas if you already have a relationship with somebody, it's a continuation of that personal relationship.
MC: Yeah. I can personally do without hearing anymore from my yoga studio or from LinkedIn at these times. But the thing that I have been noticing is that I have been rekindling old friendships. I've been reaching out to people who I went to college, who I haven't spoken to or seen in years and years. And I have friends who live in rural Montana and rural Vermont and the Hudson Valley in the middle of nowhere, and I've been reaching out to them, partially, just to find out how things are at their area. Are they as weird as they are here in San Francisco? Maybe. But also just, how you doing? How have you been? What's new? Do you have children now that you worry about?
And it's also been really nice to reconnect with my older relatives because they're all checking in with each other too. There are some email threads going around in my family with all the older people in my family and all of my cousins and everybody's sending pictures and talking about food. It's been weird to come together with people so distant. And I do believe, especially for people who aren't equipped to do Zoom, that email is the medium of choice for this. It makes sense because it's asynchronous. There's very little pressure involved in getting everybody together. It's easy to say something thoughtful over email in a way that it isn't when you're looking at somebody on a screen.
LG: Right. And there's certainly an argument to be made that right now, emails are better for posterity and for remembering what we're going through than a million different IMs or WhatsApp chats or Zooms or whatever. We'll have these really poignant, meaningful conversations with some people in our lives right now. And if that happens to happen over email, and we all get through this, someday you might be glad you have those emails. And you might not feel the same way about other communication forms that are just leapfrogging email right now in terms of utility. So one of the questions I had as I was working on this story, well, is there a better way to write emails? I mean maybe in a few weeks, we'll see everybody just drops off this appendage of, hope you're well and healthy. But maybe it'll keep happening. And is there a way for us to just be better about this?
So I called up Randy Malamud. He is a professor of English at Georgia State University, and he's also the author of a book called Email. And he admits that he is not a big fan of email to begin with. He believes that we're all stuck in these, what he calls, philosophies of how we email generally. And he notes in his book that everybody thinks they're the better emailer, and everyone else is doing it wrong. Right?
We're super smart and succinct and get to the point and practically poetic in all of our own emails. But everyone else is stiff and long-winded and doing it the wrong way, right? But he said that he believes that even though right now it feels like are changing in our email and communications, that it's not going to fundamentally change, that we're all still going to be stuck in our philosophies. And he did have some advice for how we could be better about it.
Randy Malamud [audio from phone call]: If you want to write a better email, write fewer of them, and write less, and write more thoughtfully. And do a draft, and put it aside for a few minutes, and come back, and edit. And think about the person that you're writing to, and picture her face, and think about what her face will look like when she sees what you're reading. And how do you think she might respond, and just ways to personalize and to get beyond the rote conventional formulaic modes of discourse that are so, so prevalent when everybody sits down to write an email.
LG: So he describes it as a meditative process. You should just be present in what you're doing. Don't just dash something off. Maybe sit and think about it a little bit. Sounds like good advice. I don't know. What do you guys think?
AR: It's a lot harder. We three have trained our entire lives to write things. And that's not necessarily a better or worse thing to have trained your entire life to do than anything else. But it does mean that we probably think, as you say, our emails are better than everybody else's, but also we're really trained up to do that form of thing. And yeah, I guess I hope mine are more meaningful now. Like Mike, I've reached out to a bunch of folks who I'm not always in touch with to be in touch with them, and I couldn't even articulate why, except that I'm stressed out and I genuinely do hope they're well.
LG: That's a great point. One of the CEOs who is quoted in this story talks about the ubiquity of this particular scenario. A lot of times, in emails, when we reach out to people to acknowledge something that's happened, it's a specific event. It could be a loss, it could be a birth, it could be something else that's going on in their life. This is something that we are all going through right now, we're all experiencing. So when you reach out to friends who maybe you haven't connected with in a long time, it's not like you're going to be like, Hey, how's it going? How's the job? Or whatever it may be. Or how are the kids? You're like, everything is cloaked right now in what is going on with this global pandemic. And so we can all maybe find a little bit of comfort in the shared experience as sad as much of it is.
MC: There's this moment I've been thinking about. This is an old man reference, so forgive me. But in the book The Maltese Falcon, the detective, Sam Spade, tells this story—people who write about that book talk about it a lot—called the Flitcraft parable. It's about a guy who goes missing, and Sam Spade, the detective, goes to find him. He tells this story. And when he finds him, he's left his whole life. He's got a whole different life. And when he finds him, he has a new life. But the new life, Spade says, looks a lot like the old life. He's got a new wife, he's got a new kid, he's got a new job, but it's just like the old life was, essentially, just with different people.
Flitcraft explains that he went on the run because a beam, a girder, fell from a construction site and almost killed him and knocked a little fragment up and gave him a little scar. And that's what gave him this existential moment where he had to run. But then he ran into something that was just like life was. And at the end of all this, Spade says that the thing that always fascinated him about Flitcraft was that he got used to beams falling. And then when no more beams fell, he got used to that too. And so now we are in a time of beams falling, and nobody knows what it will look like when we get used to that.
LG: Adam, thank you so much for joining us. We're going to take another quick break. And then when we come back, we're going to do recommendations and I hope you'll stick around for that.
[Break]
LG: All right, Adam, since you're our guest, what's your recommendation this week?
AR: We, in my house, for me and my partner, we're watching—and for my 14-year-old watching for the first time—the television show Community, which was a show that I deeply, deeply loved the first time around. I was excited to get to show it to my kid. And the thing that I have fallen in love all over again with it is the crystalline structure of the writing. I understand that the writer's room was a little bit of a toxic crazy house, but the results that they managed to get on the screen was, I'm going to say, maybe the best sitcom of all time.
LG: What's an example of the writing that you like?
AR: Well, there is an episode called "Modern Warfare," but I think we stans call it the paintball episode. And in about 22 minutes of television, it manages to both parody, pastiche, and lovingly outdo the entire history of the action genre in both Asia and the United States. It was actually written by a woman who is still writing TV now and was directed by Justin Lin, who went on to direct a Star Trek movie. And it's just both the funniest, most loving, making fun of action and also being action and managing to have stuff from the beginning pay off at the end. And it's just a real tour de force of how you put together a story. And I've been thinking about how to put together stories a lot lately.
LG: That's an excellent recommendation. Mike, what's yours?
MC: So I'm going to go out on a limb here and recommend a face-to-face social app called Houseparty. You may have heard of it. It is owned by Epic Games, the people behind Fortnite. And it's basically like a cross-platform Facetime. So it shows the person that you're chatting with at the top of the screen, and then it shows you at the bottom of the screen. And you can have these really fun ad hoc one-to-one conversations with people. You can also have multiple people join in. You can play little games. But really, it's just like a very easy, friction-free way to chat with people. And it's outside of your normal places that you may chat, places like WhatsApp for example, which also has video chat.
Houseparty's just more fun. It's easier to use, and the interface is nice because it divides up the screen in a way that makes it easy to see both you and the person that you're talking with. I will say that it is a vacuum cleaner for personal information. If you're not careful, it will suck up your contacts, your location, every phone number that's on your phone. When you first sign up for it, it asks you to give over all this information. It also gives you very tiny button down on the corner to skip. So I recommend that when you install it, you go skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip.
Give it absolute minimum amount of information that will allow you to give and still use the app. And then find your friends by typing their names in the search box. That's really the only safe way to use it. But it is a lot of fun, and all the kids are on it. So if you have kids in your life or young people in your life who want to get on Houseparty, don't be afraid of it. Download it. It's also fun as a man in his mid-forties. I chat with other friends in their mid-forties, and we are loving it. So Houseparty, that's my recommendation. Free to use, be careful of the privacy stuff, but a lot of fun.
LG: [Laughs] Mike, I'm glad you put that caveat in there. I needed a laugh this week. And I'm just really glad that you clarified that you're chatting with other men in their mid-forties after …
MC: And not just teens.
LG: ... acknowledging that it's big among the teens.
MC: Yes.
LG: Thank you. Thank you very much for that recommendation.
MC: What's yours, Lauren?
LG: I just got into The Wire. I never watched The Wire before. It's now available on Amazon Prime, and I just started watching it, and I really like it. And I really like Dominic West as an actor. I like the whole cast actually. And I've just heard so many good things about this for years and I had never watched The Wire before. So I figured, now is the time. And so far, I'm into it, but I can't comment on it as an entire body of work so far.
MC: It's the greatest sitcom in American television history.
AR: Oh, man.
MC: It's a fantastic show. And Lauren, you know what, there is a podcast coming out on The Ringer network later …
LG: Oh, really?
MC: … this month that goes over every episode of The Wire.
LG: So I'll have to watch all of The Wire just so I can listen to that podcast later this month?
MC: Yes, I'm going to use the podcast's release as an opportunity to rewatch the show.
LG: I think that sounds like a good call. And, honestly, there's not much else. Right now, almost for meditative reasons, you're taking it day by day or week by week. And it's hard to look too far ahead. So it sounds like maybe a podcast launch a little bit later in the month is just the right amount of time to think about a piece of media to look forward to. Sorry, that was really depressing, but it's true.
AR: Time gets strange. Unprecedented times like these, time get strange.
LG: All right. Thank you so much to Adam Rogers for joining us. He's really, really busy right now doing some fantastic science and health reporting for WIRED, and yet he's taking the time to join Gadget Labs. So thank you, Adam.
AR: I'm just really glad to see you.
LG: Glad to see all of you over Zoom. And thank you for listening. To our audience, if you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. This show is produced by Boone Ashworth. Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman. We'll be back next week. So until then, please stay healthy and we really mean that.
[End theme music]
- The mathematics of predicting the course of the coronavirus
- What to do if you (or a loved one) might have Covid-19
- First denial, then fear: patients in their own words
- Fun tools and tips to stay social while you’re stuck at home
- Should I stop ordering packages? (And other Covid-19 FAQs, answered)
- Read all of our coronavirus coverage here
