The New Normal in California #1: How Did This Thing Get Started?

Doing live, in-person events is off the table for a while, but we’re still interviewing Californians doing groundbreaking things during “Pandemic Time.”

So here is our podcast series “The New Normal in California.” Over the next few weeks – or however long it takes before we get the all-clear to leave our houses again – we’ll be looking at the ways our coronavirus-affected lives are changing over the short- and long-term, and talking with Californians making significant change in this New Normal.

In this first episode, we’re taking a look at the coronavirus that sparked a global pandemic, where it started and why, and what can we do as humans to stop this kind of thing from happening again?

To help us understand all that, we interviewed Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, a professor of epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine who studies animal-to-human transmission of viruses. Her new study about that type of viral transmission was published early April in a prestigious research journal, and it is already the most downloaded study in that publication’s 105-year- history.

We talk with Dr. Johnson about animals, humans, how they mix, how that leads to deadly pandemics, and how there is still hope for reducing them – if we make significant changes in the way we live today.

PODCAST PLAY-BY-PLAY
* O to 6:30 min - Intro to this new podcast series, and why Dr. Anthony Fauci inspired this first episode
* 6:30 min - How dizzy water birds that were unable to fly made Johnson become an epidemiologist and do wildlife research
* 11:15 - Why you should watch the movie "Contagion" to understand how small actions can turn into a global pandemic
* 17:10 min - From AIDS in the 1980s to Ebola around 2013 -- why have more of these animal-to-human virus outbreaks been happening one after the other?
* 24:25 min - How COVID-19 got its start, and how it's different from other viruses in the coronavirus family
* 29:55 min - Johnson's just-published "rockstar" findings, and why hers is the most-downloaded study in the 105-year history of the "Proceedings of the Royal Society B" journal
* 36 min - California has a lot of animals cited in Johnson's study -- should we who live near them be concerned about human-to-animal transmission of viruses?
* 38:40 min - What about "zoonotic spillover" between humans and their cats, dogs and other pets?
* 41:10 min - Johnson is in charge of PREDICT, a program that detects new, potentially dangerous diseases, and helps labs worldwide to stop global pandemic threats -- but last year the Feds stopped its funding, and the program was scheduled to shut down in March 2020. Has that changed?
* 46:30 min - Has this global pandemic made it more likely that countries will collaborate in efforts to stop more of them?
* 49:10 min - Will "zoonotic spillover" ever really go away? And what can we as humans do to reduce the number and risk of them?