COVID Sucks, People Don't

Shifting from running zero COVID tests to running millions is not a simple process, but a lot of people have mobilized to make it happen. A few weeks ago I got the chance to talk with Fred Turner from Curative about how they went from a company with just a few employees running a variety of tests to a company with hundreds focused entirely on COVID testing. This conversation really helped me feel a bit better about our situation. 

Destin Sandlin is, in his normal jobs, an engineer and a content creator. But for the last couple months, he has become a community organizer and logistics expert making and distributing PPE with a network of hundreds of volunteers. We're each looking to our toolkits right now, but let's not forget how much our toolkits expand when they are merged.

Vi Hart is a mathematician and technologist and she has been working (with many other experts) on a report called "The Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience." She absolutely schools me on how bluetooth tracking and contact tracing actually works. And she also makes it clear that right now isn't a time for picking one strategy, it's a time for exploring all of them without knowing for sure which ones are going to be most helpful.  But one thing's for sure, all of this would be much harder if it happened even ten years ago. 

I think many, if not most people, right now are looking to their skills to see how they can be turned to assist in this weird, hard, and bad times. But what if your main asset is that you're the social media manager for Steak Umm brand frozen meat slices? 

Ian Haydon is in one of the first clinical trials for COVID-19, and he's surprisingly chill about it. Let's chat with him in this, the very first episode of COVID Sucks, People Don't.