Dr. Elodie Ghedin on the covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic

In a special episode, I speak to Elodie Ghedin about the pandemic and global health crisis we are facing. Elodie is a virologist and professor at NYU in Biology and Global Public Health. She studies microbial pathogens including human parasites and viruses and has done extensive work with influenza and other RNA viruses. In this episode we talk about the coronavirus that causes covid-19, from its emergence at the end of 2019 to the current crisis, and hopes for future treatments and vaccines. Elodie educates us on R0 (R nought) and the problems with the slow ramp up of testing in the United States. We also talk about how the genomics community is helping with real-time analysis of the pandemic. You can find Elodie on twitter @eghedin and her lab page is here: https://publichealth.nyu.edu/faculty/elodie-ghedin
Some of the resources we mention in the podcast can be found below.
https://nextstrain.org/
https://platform.gisaid.org/