Colbert and Gupta on the Pandemic, Then and Now

The other night, the Late Show re-ran an interview Stephen Colbert did with Sanjay Gupta in mid-March 2020, just as the Apocalypse was getting started. They had just eliminated the audience (in favor of a handful if staffers) and the following week they moved the show to Colbert's home. Gupta was Colbert's last guest before the shutdown.

What is striking about the interview is what Gupta thought about the pandemic at the time.  Here's a review of the claims he made and what we know in hindsight.

• "For the majority of people, this is not something that's going to make them tremendously ill, this coronavirus. It might make them sick for a few days but they're likely to recover."  True.  According to research, 81% of people have mild disease, 14% have severe disease, and 5% have critical disease.
• "We have identified who the vulnerable population is here. It is elderly people." True. According to figures from Our World in Data there is a power curve for mortality risk.  Case mortality rates nearly double for every ten-year age range from 40-49 on.
• "[The virus] doesn't seem to aerosolize like measles, for example. With measles the viruses will attach to dust and they'll literally suspend in the air. ...That's not the case here. So respiratory droplets, the virus is in these droplets. So when people cough or sneeze they can hang in the air for a little bit, but typically they'll go to ground or to a surface or something like that. ...So those respiratory droplets can land on a surface, you touch the surface, you touch your eyes or nose or mouth, and that's how people get infected."  False, at least the first part. Aerosols, not fomites (droplets) are now recognized as the main transmission method. This is not to say the fomite route is not possible, but it's not the main way the virus is spread.
• "We failed with regard to testing in this country." True. At the time of this interview, nobody—even Gupta—could get tests, despite the Orange Douche's lie to the contrary. Tests eventually became more available, but due to the botched response by the government we never mounted an adequate program of testing and contact tracing in the U.S. 

Then the interview veered into politics.  Being right on three out of four counts ain't bad.

Gupta appeared again the other night, 15 months later, on Colbert's second night back with a live audience.  Colbert asked him for his overall take on how we did.  He said he's so happy to be back among humans, but 600,000 people have died, so we didn't do very well.  He also talked about the delta variant and why it makes it so important that people get vaccinated.

The original interview is worth watching. It reminded me what a shitshow it was when the pandemic first got started and made me appreciate how much better things are now. We have vaccines, a better understanding of how the disease can be prevented, and competent political leadership. We had none of that in March 2020.

Image by the Late Show