Benjamin Thompson

Welcome to Coronapod.

Noah Baker

In this show, we’re going to bring you Nature’s take on the latest COVID-19 developments.

Benjamin Thompson

And we’ll be speaking to experts around the world about research during the pandemic.

Amy Maxmen

I really don’t know how this plays out. We also don’t know a ton about this virus, so there’s so many open questions. I just have a really hard time making predictions because I don’t know how the outbreak is going to change.

Benjamin Thompson

Hi, I’m Benjamin Thompson. Welcome to episode three of Coronapod. I’m still here in my south London basement, and I’m joined on the line by Noah Baker and Amy Maxmen. Noah, how are you doing, first of all?

Noah Baker

Not bad. I like that at the beginning of Coronapod we hear about your basement. It’s nice to know what’s going on in the basement in south London.

Benjamin Thompson

And Amy, how about you? You’re in California, right?

Amy Maxmen

Hi, I’m good. Today, again, is not the day that I’m going to use video.

Benjamin Thompson

So, for the sake of the listeners then, I should just say that, Noah, you and I are on a video chat right now so we can see inside each other’s homemade studios, but Amy, for the third week in a row, you’ve decided to go audio only, so you can see us but we can’t see you.

Amy Maxmen

Not only am I looking like a mess but my house is also a little messy, so it’s all about next time… maybe.

Noah Baker

That’s why we’re really in these booths, just to hide our messy houses.

Amy Maxmen

Laughs. I mean I can’t see the background of your house but yeah, you do seem to live in some sort of like comforter pillow situation.

Noah Baker

So, Ben and I have just been tuned into a news conference by the UK’s health secretary, Matt Hancock. He himself is fresh out of quarantine because he previously tested positive for COVID-19, and in this conference, he’s laid out the latest grand plan about how the UK is going to respond. In particular, he referenced testing a lot.

Benjamin Thompson

He’s come out today with really kind of, I think, his five pillars. He mentioned about what we’re going to do to try and get testing levels up. I think currently, only a few thousand NHS frontline workers have been tested. He’s talking about getting that up to, what was it, 100,000, Noah, by the end of the month? Something like that.

Noah Baker

100,000 is the goal. Exactly how they’re distributed is a question that we are exactly not sure of the answer to yet, but there is a whole, as you say, five-pillar strategy for it.

Amy Maxmen

In the US, we have a situation now where there is all of these promises that have been going on for weeks now about how we’re going to really have 100,000 tests come on board, and there’s all sorts of numbers flying around. But in reality, when you talk to doctors they’ll tell you people are waiting five plus days to get results returned, and then people who do feel really sick will say they haven’t been able to get tested, so it’s clear that those, although they may be on the way, have not arrived yet. And I guess my question is, are you having the same situation in the UK?

Noah Baker

The sort of numbers and what the government are saying and how that’s translating into real life has been quite central to a lot of people’s discussions in the UK recently. At the end of last week, there was an announcement in a select committee that 3.5 million antibody tests had been ordered and they were going to be up and running within days, and then rolled back quickly to, oh, hang on, we just need to test them first and make sure they actually work, and then no one’s heard anything about them for a little while. And there’s this number that’s been floating around saying 25,000 tests per day by the middle of April is what people are on track for, and then we’ve actually seen maybe 8,000 or 10,000 tests per day, and the government’s not really been responding very much, up until this briefing, to all of the questions that people have been asking saying, ‘Well, where are these tests? Where are these tests? You say they’re coming and we don’t see it seemingly coming.’ And we haven’t really had much of an answer on that until this briefing, which is now claiming 100,000 tests is what the aim is, and there’s this strategy to get to that which includes trying to launch a whole new diagnostic industry, is how Matt Hancock put it. So, to enlist the likes of AstraZeneca and GSK to work with some smaller diagnostics labs to try to launch a whole new industry to develop diagnostic tests. Exactly how that plays out I guess is the next thing that we need to find out.

Benjamin Thompson

And of course, there are sort of two different sorts of test. There’s the ‘have you currently got the virus’ test which I think is super important for the patients and for frontline healthcare workers, and then there’s the ‘have you had the virus’ test. But yeah, I think speed is of the essence, right? We’ve been learning about a company in Cambridge that have been trying to develop a well, maybe repurpose a testing sort of machine they use for HIV to try and get down tests to 90 minutes, I think, rather than the 24 hours they claim it’s currently taking for that. So, I think lots of different people are coming at this at lots of different angles.

Amy Maxmen

I think the issue with tests, there’s like a few things at play. So, one is like the most basic sort of thing that doesn’t need to be produced by a specific company, per say, is based on PCR, and that really only takes about two hours, but the deal is that you have to get the right kind of sample from a person, like in the way back of their nasal cavity. You have to get the right sample, you have to prep that sample, and you load it into a thermocycler, but you might want to batch it together with other samples because those reagents are expensive. So, you wait for 96 or something like that, and that takes time, so that’s why a turnaround might be 24 hours, but then it’s even longer when there’s this huge backup. So, just to be clear, it’s not that that test itself needs to be super slow, but it’s a matter of what’s the throughput for it. And then there’s kind of theses rapid diagnostic kits, and those are usually based on either looking for antibodies or they’re looking for antigens, which is kind of the part of the virus that triggers an immune response. Those kits are a lot faster and they also don’t require as much equipment, like they don’t require the kind of equipment you need to do these PCR-based tests. The issues are kind of around accuracy right now. We really don’t know that much about the accuracy. One problem that we’re really seeing, definitely in the UK and the US, is maybe we’re not used to responding outbreaks. Now, I’ve reported from a number of outbreaks and I’ll tell you, people will say things like, ‘Perfect is the enemy of good’, and the fact is, this is a huge race. I mean with the pace that this outbreak is going, there’s really not as much time to really go through the careful processes that we might always do. Now, you don’t want to do something completely sloppy, but there’s a point at which you say, ‘Hey, listen. This is something that we have now versus nothing.’

Noah Baker

That is a discussion that’s been happening quite a lot here, especially with relation to the antibody tests that need to be tested and so on, and there’s a line that’s being repeated often which is that ‘a bad test is worse that no test,’ and it’s not been completely clear exactly where that line is. Is that a 5% false positive rate? Is that a 10% false positive rate? What does that mean? And those numbers don’t seem to be very clearly coming out. What is a bad test?

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, it is, and that’s a good question.

Noah Baker

One other thing that people in the UK have been discussing quite a lot is why we are in the situation that we’re in. So, one thing that Matt Hancock, in his press briefing today, talked about what the challenges that the UK has been facing, and so he cited, for example, the difficulty with getting reagents, these reagents that are needed. There are some very specific reagents and the whole world is trying to get hold of those right now, and that’s something that I feel like is kind of an ongoing global supply problem which you’re going to hear cited in lots of countries around the world.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, for sure, and something I heard from researchers in Peru is that if the US and Europe are pulling on these supplies, you can only imagine how these other countries are going to feel. And it’s not stupid, by the way, and it’s not cruel that the US and Europe is pulling on them because we have huge outbreaks. I’m in touch with various researchers here in the US and I know there’s whole groups that are people who are molecular biologists who are also trying to work out, ‘Okay, what are workarounds? This reagent is gone. Can we use this reagent or this kit to extract? RNA isn’t available. What are some others ways to do this?’ And like you said, there might be some cost to that. Maybe it’s not the ideal way, but if it’s a way that’s on hand, can we use it?

Noah Baker

Quite commonly, I’m hearing government ministers in the UK regularly refer to science. They’re saying we want to get the best minds and the best science on this. There was a call for the life sciences industry to come together to help, and there was a suggestion that the government at all stages has been following the very best of what science has to offer and what scientists are suggesting. But there’s a lot of scientists that don’t necessarily think that countries like the UK really have been doing that and really have been following the scientists’ advice, and I wonder whether or not, Amy, you might have been seeing in the US if there was a frustration with scientists and the fact that science is being mentioned so much and lauded so much by those in power even though perhaps they aren’t really being listened to?

Amy Maxmen

I mean I feel like I would hope that a lot of people who might not have understood how much we need science and how much we need to fund the scientists are now understanding that. I’m not super optimistic because I still feel that there’s a big part of the American population that does not respect scientific experts, and it sort of boggles my own mind because we have examples of where it works and how it works, and people have told us how to do it but they don’t really want to.

Noah Baker

Absolutely.

Benjamin Thompson

The other thing that’s been happening in the UK that’s got a lot of coverage as well over these past few days, I suppose, is this app that’s been doing the rounds from King’s College London, and I think we’ve talked a lot about it’s not just about testing as well – it’s all the stuff that goes around it as well – and this has been downloaded by 1.5 million users thus far, and I think it’s asking people to log their symptoms of whether they think they might have had COVID-19 and has a list of what those things are. And now, the results haven’t actually been properly published yet or peer reviewed, but a lot of interesting stuff has come out of that, right Noah?

Noah Baker

Yeah, have you heard anything about this, Amy, this app that’s coming out of King’s College London?

Amy Maxmen

No, so I have two thoughts though. So, first of all, I don’t know anything about it. But my quick thought is one, okay, great, I do think there’s a role for technology in this outbreak, especially when it comes to things like contact tracing. This is not that, of course. But I have to say, if it is something that is kind of collecting data on clinical symptoms that people feel – headache, fever – we were just talking about how accurate are these rapid diagnostic tests, well, I’ll tell you they’re probably a whole lot more accurate than that is.

Noah Baker

So, I sat in a press briefing from some of the researchers on this app, and they did acknowledge the dangers of self-reporting, but they were hoping that because of the sheer scale of data they’re managing to gather on a daily basis that they can start to try to work through those kinks. And one particularly interesting thing that they were talking about was the group of people through their app that have been reporting their symptoms but have also been tested positive for the virus, so those are people then that they can try to see those self-reported symptoms link with that. And one thing that was particularly interesting that came out of there was a symptom that they call anosmia, so this symptom where you lose your sense of taste and smell, and they found that to be much more common than perhaps they’d expected, to the point now that they’re doing a lot of data crunching. They’re trying to work out the significance of this and look at the potential errors involved with this, but perhaps this could be a new symptom that the NHS in the UK currently isn’t looking for but maybe might be helpful to help diagnose COVID-19 because it seems to be quite specific to COVID-19, this anosmia symptom.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, I’ve heard that. That’s great.

Benjamin Thompson

We’ve talked a lot about the UK there, Amy, but last week you mentioned you were going to be sort of spreading your net quite globally and seeing what’s going on around the world. What have you found? What’s been going on in different places?

Amy Maxmen

I’ve been watching the US which, this week, has almost 230,000 cases. Florida still, I think, has around 8,000 cases and has just decided well, they’ll cancel a lot of gatherings, but churches can still meet, things like that. So, I’m watching my own country kind of just not do the basics of epidemic control. I decided to kind of look abroad and see what’s going on. So, I really focused on let’s call them low-resource countries. These are low- and middle-income countries that can count the number of intensive care units they have on one hand. So, countries that have very poor hospital systems and realise that when coronavirus starts to spike there, it’s going to be really bad because patients will not be able to get treatment. Also, they also have very few health workers per population, so if their nurses or doctors suddenly get sick or die from COVID-19, now they’re even more short-staffed and it has all sorts of terrible knock-on effects for people that need care for other diseases, so it’s a very grim and scary future that they’re looking at. So, I looked at specifically El Salvador, Peru, Kenya and Nigeria. I know it’s a kind of random grouping but these are countries where I was talking to people and what they were doing sort of stuck out to me.

Noah Baker

Yeah, perhaps it’s sort of an esoteric mix of countries, but the story that you’ve written, it really covers a ton of ground. I’d recommend people go and read it. We’ll put a link in the show notes. When I first read it, I was particularly grabbed by the story in Nigeria. They really got on this very fast there.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, back in January, the Nigeria CDC started seeing this go up in China, and the head of the NCDC, I’ve actually profiled before for Nature, Chikwe Ihekweazu, saw that this could be a big problem. He also works closely with the World Health Organization. So, in January he started asking about testing. He actually even went on a delegation to Wuhan and other cities in China to see what they were doing, and he was sending word to his people to say let’s get ready for this thing. So, on 3 February, Nigeria got the PCR-based diagnostic kit that the WHO was recommending. This was created by researchers in Germany. So, by 3 February they had it. They had the positive controls and they tested it. They were ready to go. Right when Chikwe had returned from China, they confirmed their first case. Immediately, they were ready to go. They diagnosed it very quickly. They sent a sample to a lab, another lab I’ve visited in Nigeria, where they sequenced it. I think this all happened within three days, and it was the first full genome of the coronavirus uploaded from Africa. So, they were kind of on it real fast. But of course, the problem starts kicking in when you start saying okay, how are you going to lockdown, Lagos alone is a city of 21 million. About two thirds of the population live in informal settlements without electricity or running water. They’re below the poverty line, so when they go to the market and sell things, this is food for the day. So, in that situation, you can’t just say, ‘Everybody stay home,’ because it’s dark and people have to leave to go to the bathroom. I was talking with one woman who said, ‘Hey, if I have some buckets of water from a well, I’m going to use them to cook dinner, not to sit and wash my hands.’ So, these are real constraints to having things like lockdowns. Nonetheless, Nigeria quickly shut their borders and they’ve sort of locked down Lagos and Abuja in another province and they’re trying to kind of limit travel, but this is going to be very, very hard and the economic downfall is massive. I mean we complain about it in the US and Europe but quite frankly this is people’s ability to eat, so that’s sort of what they’re grappling with there. And at the same time, cases have been rising. I think they’re just around 100 now, maybe a little bit more since I haven’t looked since yesterday and this stuff moves up so fast, but they’re backlogged on their testing.

Benjamin Thompson

And you saw some countries which were taking pretty extreme measures sort of really early on, maybe before they even saw any cases, like in Peru, for example.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, isn’t that incredible? So, I’d say like Peru and El Salvador moved super-fast. I think Columbia moved pretty fast too. El Salvador even started taking actions before they had a single confirmed case. They said they don’t want people coming from outbreak countries before they had any cases, and they also started banning large gatherings. They then decided to say that people can only leave their house for absolutely essential reasons, and in edition, there’s a curfew. I think they started at 8pm but it might be earlier now. And not only did they say this but they also have been enforcing it, arresting people who break that quarantine. The government’s even kind of posted on their website the number of people who are detained every day and kind of another little interesting titbit there is there’s parts of El Salvador that are controlled by gangs rather than the government, and a number of large gangs have also said that they will be beating or fining anyone that breaks the lockdown. And unfortunately, in reporting this story, I saw a lot of videos shared on WhatsApp, so a video he shared with me was of a gang hitting someone behind the knees with a bat who broke quarantine. It seems completely crazy here, and I’m not saying it’s not crazy. That said, the whole country has 100 beds in intensive care units and most of those are in private hospitals – this is what I heard from Doctors Without Borders – so you can kind of see where the thought stems from.

Noah Baker

It puts things in a whole new perspective as someone sitting here in the UK – and there’s people that are still not abiding by the social distancing measures that are put into place – just how, I suppose, extreme this has been in countries that are even less able to manage this than places like the US and the UK. This social distancing is so central to them.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, in Peru, they’re also arresting people, and I think I saw one number where the president said that he had, so far, arrested more than 20,000 people. I should say what they do there is they give somebody a kind of fine and then something goes on their record, so it’s not like they’re being housed in a jail somewhere which could be really dangerous. But the people I spoke with in Peru, and of course that’s not everyone, it seemed like a lot of them were sort of on board with this. They don’t have this kind of sense of security that ‘Oh well, if something happens there’s always the hospital.’ One of the researchers I spoke with said something like, ‘Here in Peru, we put the health of the population above companies,’ things like that. So, they might have sort of a sentiment that this is what’s truly necessary to stop it before it gets really bad. Peru also started building these big isolation centres even before they had any cases. Again though, they’re having this issue with trying to scale up tests, and something interesting in Peru was, I talked to Partners in Health and they’ve been working in Peru for a long time, and they’re working really closely with the government on their response. Partners in Health is a philanthropic organisation that works on healthcare issues. And what they’re doing with the government is they’ve actually ordered already, they’ve said, 30,000 of these rapid diagnostic tests that we talked about in the beginning. Those have already arrived and they say they want to reach 1 million of those. And they’re not exactly sure how to use them yet, but one thought is, yeah, it’s not perfect but in many parts of the country outside of the capital city of Lima where they don’t have PCR, how can they use these rapidly? There’s a debate to be had about accuracy, but at the time they were leaning more on the side of saying we really need to just ramp up testing right now.

Noah Baker

One thing that is also important to maybe mention is contact tracing, so trying to trace these cases when they exist. The difficulty with contact tracing though is that it can be quite labour intensive to do that. Are countries that are already low-resource, do they have the kind of capability that you might need to be able to contact trace as well as test, as well as all the other challenges that they’re facing?

Amy Maxmen

Well, ironically, one thing this pandemic has taught me is that some of my expectations are wrong, like contact tracing is very labour intensive but it’s not like it requires really fancy technology. It’s not as resource intensive as, say, ordering reagents and ventilators and things like that, so yes, contact tracing is always very hard, but I’ve seen contact tracing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What some of these countries might be actually very good at is moving quickly and being really flexible, knowing how to scale up workers really fast and let people do specific jobs. That’s kind of a human management sort of issue. The countries I wrote about here actually don’t have massive outbreaks and they are trying to do contact tracing. I shouldn’t brag about them too much. I was talking with the head of the Nigeria CDC, Dr Chikwe, and when I was like, ‘Well, are you going to do kind of like what Singapore did and get people’s like all of where they’ve been in two hours and contact all of those people and let everyone know them, know where they’ve been,’ because Singapore did an incredible job with this, and he just sort of laughed and he was like, ‘I’m not Singapore. None of us are Singapore.’

Noah Baker

Yeah.

Amy Maxmen

So, it may not be to that level, but I don’t know that we aren’t inherently any better or worse at contact tracing just because we have wealth here in the US, and in fact, Partners in Health, I think, might start helping Massachusetts with contact tracing, Massachusetts in the US, because clearly, we’re sort of massively failing in that department.

Benjamin Thompson

You mentioned some of the resource-poor countries you looked at that have been fairly robust in trying to get ahead of this outbreak. Do you get a sense of what might happen if these mechanisms don’t work as planned? What sort of scale might be talking for outbreaks in some of these countries?

Amy Maxmen

I actually wrote some of the epidemiologists that are doing a lot of great modelling work out of Harvard when I was doing this to ask that question, what can be he projected number of deaths, things like that. And the truth is it’s really hard to say. I think anyone that’s looking at this is just terrified because, like I said, it’s not only numbers of death from the coronavirus but also all of the knock-on effects about what happens to the health system. So, I think it’s fair to say it’s probably going to be pretty bad if it gets out of hand, but it’s hard to give a number because we don’t know how it plays out. So, one of the unknowns is this. In a lot of sub-Saharan African countries, life expectancy is between 50 and 60, and the population skews young, so there’s a lot of younger people. So, on the one hand, maybe that will mean that there’s not so much intensive care needed and deaths from this virus, so that could be great. But what we don’t know is there’s also tons of malnutrition, there’s huge rates of malaria, there’s high rates of HIV in a lot of countries. There’s a lot of chronic diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure that are not treated or not even diagnosed, so we don’t know how do those comorbidities influence the coronavirus. And there’s treatments people are giving, like some of the treatments being tested are antiretrovirals, well, how do those interact with the drugs that people are already on? So, there’s a lot of kind of open questions, so that’s why it’s hard to put a number on it.

Noah Baker

Yeah, even in the UK, I think people are struggling to put numbers on a lot of these things about what is a death caused by coronavirus versus a death caused by an underlying condition with coronavirus. These interactions between conditions and coronavirus are still so poorly understood.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, I think that seems like such an important area of study, just even clinical care for people with underlying conditions and for the elderly, just to look at them as a separate group and say, ‘What happens to them when they’re infected, and can we prevent some of those deaths?’

Noah Baker

You mentioned, Amy, what might happen in healthcare scenarios in low-income countries around the world, and again I think it’s interesting to come back to what we’ve seen so far in the sort of epicentres of these outbreaks, which at the moment is Europe and the US, and even right now, hospitals are starting to be overwhelmed. We talked about New York last week, and this week in the UK, Ben, you’ve been talking to someone in the UK who is a clinician researcher about what life in a hospital is like at the moment.

Benjamin Thompson

Yeah, that’s right. I spoke to Jess, she’s a lung specialist, she works in a London hospital, and we had a good chat about what’s going on and what it’s like being a research academic. Actually, let me play you a little bit of what she said. Here’s just a little cut-down version.

Jess

There is a general air of anxiety everywhere. You can feel it. There is an edge of adrenaline and a bitter taste at the back of your throat all of the time. Putting on and taking off the personal protective equipment is exhausting. The nurses are absolute heroes. They are in their kit for three, four, five hours at a time. They are having to manage increasing numbers of patients. In intensive care, usually you have one-to-one nursing with patient ratio and that is going to have to change and care is going to be compromised as a result, but there is no other choice.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah, that is quite a clip. I have to say my heart goes out to healthcare workers so much in times like this.

Benjamin Thompson

It does seem like things are very, very difficult at the moment in hospitals around the world.

Amy Maxmen

Part of what makes me upset is that for the lack of action that countries’ take it’s like we’re putting it on our healthcare workers, people who are giving so much to help. And I saw this clip that somebody sent me, another WhatsApp video from Peru, and it was in an area of Lima that’s pretty dead, so it was just pictures all dark and it was like all these apartment buildings, and at 8pm when curfew starts, everyone goes to their balcony or their window and just starts shouting and cheering for the healthcare workers because they all realise what kind of bravery that takes.

Benjamin Thompson

I know friends of mine who live in Barcelona. They’re out every night as well banging on their pots and pans as well, and certainly people in Italy are doing the same thing, right, just to try and give back in some way to the people who are caring for them.

Noah Baker

It’s a really marvellous response, but of course we have to remember that showing that gratitude is really important to show that they’re really valued but then of course the other thing that’s really important that governments need to think about is that we should be doing all we can to support them and part of that is to try to follow those guidelines, try to listen to what the researchers are saying about the best way to protect people and protect healthcare systems.

Amy Maxmen

Yeah.

Benjamin Thompson

Well then both, loads to chew over there, but maybe on a lighter note, what one thing has stood out to you this week that’s been going on the world?

Amy Maxmen

You want me to tell you my favourite thing I’ve heard?

Noah Baker

Please do.

Amy Maxmen

Well this sounds a little bit silly, but one thing I enjoyed about reporting my story from various countries was like seeing all of these videos from around the world that people are sharing on social media, but my own personal PSA that I saw last night that I just loved is Samuel L. Jackson reads a new poem that’s called ‘Stay the F*** at home’, and it is incredible. I highly recommend.

Noah Baker

I really want to look it up. I’m going to be looking it up as soon as I get off this podcast.

Amy Maxmen

I’ve sent it to like all of my relatives, like my favourite elderly aunt in New York who keeps asking like, ‘Oh, but can I just go to this restaurant,’ so I sent that to her to answer her question – stay the f*** at home.

Noah Baker

I have two favourite stories recently. One is in response to the slightly worrying lack of PPE here in the UK, there is a medical fetish company that has donated its entire stock to the NHS because they decided they needed it more than its usual clientele, which I thought was a brilliant story. And the other one is some friends of mine, or friends of friends really. They are family that was stuck at home. They got rather bored and they’re quite musical, so they rewrote a song from Les Misérables and recorded it and it’s all over the TV now which is great. They’ve become sort of internet famous, singing songs about what they do when they can’t wash their underwear. I’d recommend people look it up.

Benjamin Thompson

Go on then, I’ll give you one as well. Patrick Stewart is reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, one a day, and it’s 1:20 of just calm of a morning for me and it really sets me up for the rest of the day.

Amy Maxmen

Will you share that?

Benjamin Thompson

I’ll put some links in the show notes for everyone.

Amy Maxmen

Oh good, thanks.

Benjamin Thompson

Well, let’s meet up again next week, Amy and Noah, and we’ll continue to cover the outbreak, but for the time being, thank you both so much for joining me once again.

Noah Baker

Thanks, Ben.

Amy Maxmen

Thank you, stay safe.

Noah Baker

Stay the f*** at home.

Amy Maxmen

Laughs.

Benjamin Thompson

We’ll hear more from Noah and Amy next week. Up next, reporter Julie Gould has been hearing about some of the difficult decisions that research groups have had to make in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown.

Julie Gould

Around the world, research groups have had to change their way of working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, whether this means spending more time on data analysis and working remotely or switching things up in the lab to help battle the virus. But working with animals presents some additional challenges, and some researchers have had to come up with unusual solutions. One such researcher is Claudio Alonso, a professor of developmental neurobiology at the University of Sussex in the UK. He studies the influence of the genetic programme on the formation and function of the nervous system and his lab uses the fruit fly model system to study this. The flies are normally housed in his laboratory in carefully controlled environments, but Claudio had to close his lab and when I spoke to him over the phone, he told me that looking after the flies is proving to be quite challenging in unpredictable ways.

Claudio Alonso

In terms of the actual plan on how to deal with this, what we had to do, and you may find this potentially funny, is we had to buy a whole range of fridges for the lab, so each member of the lab was now given a fridge in order to keep fly food for as long as possible, and we’re going to be distribute all of our critical stocks among lab members so that we can keep all the stocks at home while the lockdown is applied. So, we will be doing effectively basic Drosophila genetics and culture in our own homes.

Julie Gould

So, you’ll be babysitting the flies in your homes. How does your family feel about that?

Claudio Alonso

They’re not very happy. I had to make the case and explain the whole situation, so I hope that I will have some sympathy in the coming weeks and months when I have to actually do some fly work in our kitchen, but anyway, I promised to clean up.

Julie Gould

So, how many flies do you currently have in your home?

Claudio Alonso

I haven’t collected the flies yet. We’re going to do this later this week, but we’re going to be dealing probably in the region of 400 or so different strains of flies in my house, an equivalent number in the houses of most of my group members.

Julie Gould

What do you store flies in? Where are you going to put them? I cannot imagine you’re going to keep them in your kitchen next to where you’re doing all your cooking.

Claudio Alonso

Well, they’re quite tidy animals and they’re very small, so the adult flies are only 3-4 millimetres long, so we can keep quite a number of them in a very small, little, as we call them, vials, with a small amount of food. So, the food is a mix of sugars and gelatine and yeast and apple juice and so on, so there’s nothing particularly disgusting for a kitchen environment. It’s not the standard practice, I must say, and we shouldn’t be doing this in general because it will change the conditions of potential experiments in the future, but it’s better to at least keep the stocks going and hope that the flies will survive and hopefully when all of this is in the past, we will stabilise the stock and then restart experiments once we are satisfied that the stocks are where they should be.

Julie Gould

So, how much of a setback is this lockdown for your research, and how long will it take to get going again?

Claudio Alonso

The impact is going to be somewhere around six months to a year, in terms of current projects, which is pretty terrible.

Julie Gould

Of course, not all scientists are able to take their animals home, and many difficult decisions are having to be made to safeguard the welfare of research animals. Andy works at a teaching university in the UK and he and his team look after many of the different sorts of animals used in the life sciences research there. Following the enforced lockdown caused by COVID-19, many of the animals had to be euthanised. I spoke to Andy over the phone to find out about the situation post-lockdown. He said the snail and zebrafish colonies that he and his team in the facility look after remain intact, but sadly, this wasn’t the case for the mice.

Andy

The colonies that we reduced by about 100, I euthanised those animals with one of my members of staff, and it wasn’t great because culling animals for a couple of hours, it’s really not nice.

Julie Gould

That’s sort of given me goose bumps, really, if you’ve had to do that yourself for a few hours.

Andy

Euthanising animals is emotional. It wasn’t a great three hours.

Julie Gould

If you don’t mind me asking, what sort of emotions do you go through across that three-hour period?

Andy

Well, the thing is, we’ve obviously cared for those animals. It is upsetting. It is very difficult to describe.

Julie Gould

There was the announcement over the weekend that this lockdown could potentially go on for six months, so what does that mean for your facility? Does that mean that you will just continue to go in and follow those social distancing rules for six months or will it have more of an impact on the animals that you have in ways that I guess you might not be able to predict yet?

Andy

We will still endeavour to go in. We have some researchers who we could call upon. In terms of the mice, through the decisions that we’ve made, we have reduced colonies down to, if you like, the bare minimum, but we will have to really look because of course the mice are going to get older, so we’ll have to look at how we bring through the next offspring to then replace breeders and be able to keep the lines intact. We have discussed freezing down the sperm because then we could potentially regenerate the line if we need to, and I think that’s something that if we are looking at something like six months, we may well have to look at doing that. And I have to be aware for my staff, continuing to work through that period of time, the extra stress on them because we’ve got work haven’t we, and then we’ve got family and all those other things that are going on in our lives.

Benjamin Thompson

You can read more about how research groups around the world that use lab animals are coping in a news article over at nature.com/news. Indeed, you’ll find all of our coronavirus coverage there. That’s it for this edition of Coronapod. Don’t forget if you’re looking for some non-corona-based science, we’re still putting out the regular Nature Podcast each Wednesday, and look out for that wherever you get your shows. Until next week, I’ve been Benjamin Thompson. See you next time.