The sudden rise of the COVID-19 pandemic last month (which, in real time, didn’t feel sudden, even as data changed on a daily basis) left us all scrambling to understand what was happening, why it was happening, and what we should do about it. One way I sought to make sense of the disease during this time of confusion and misinformation was to refocus my Deviate podcast on collecting insights from medical professionals, and stories from stranded travelers around the world.
What follows is a curated collection of these podcast insights and stories. As of now they offer essential perspective and data about what is happening with the pandemic, how to deal with it, and how it might affect us moving forward. Over time, as the pandemic subsides, these episodes will speak to the moment in which they were made — a moment characterized by uncertainty and confusion, resignation and resolution. Here are six episodes that speak to the moment.
How Nomadic Matt got COVID-19. Plus: Reports from stranded travelers
Within the travel-blogging community, the fact that author and blogger Nomadic Matt (aka Matt Kepnes) was diagnosed with COVID-19 in mid-March underscored the seriousness of the pandemic for travelers. This episode recounts Matt’s experience of contracting (and dealing with) the disease. It also features dispatches from travelers stranded in places like the Canary Islands, Peru, Kenya, Japan, Spain, Denmark, and China.
On losing one’s parents to COVID-19: A traveler-report addendum
One of the traveler dispatches in Episode 107 included a report from Marco Ferrarese, an Italian travel writer on assignment for Fodor’s, who found himself stuck in Peru while the pandemic ravaged his home region back in Italy. Marco ended up losing both his mother and his father to COVID-19 within a three-day period; in this episode, which is given over entirely to Marco and his story, details how this happened.
What it’s like to travel during COVID-19: Reports from around the world
This episode collects that pandemic stories of travelers around the world, including sheltering in place in Poland, attempting to get out of Tunisia, looking for flights out of Turkey, dealing with the pandemic during a year abroad in Australia, making sense of the pandemic reaction in Mexico, pausing an international motorcycle journey in Uruguay, working with locals to solve problems in Thailand, dealing with uncertainties in Argentina, keeping one’s children safe in Spain, and how pandemic life in France is a model for what could happen in the United States.
How COVID-19 will transform airports (and other pandemic considerations)
This episode of Deviate features a conversation with Dr. JP Santiago about how the COVID-19 pandemic will change global air travel moving forward, what the scientific data says right now about how long COVID-19 can contaminate various surfaces, what to make of certain “folk cures” for COVID-19, what other pandemics, such as H1N1 can (or cannot) teach us about how to respond to COVID-19, and when “normal” life might return, given pandemic concerns, and what that might look like.
Why the way we discuss (and interpret information about) COVID-19 matters
This episode introduces the insights of Dr. JP Santiago, a veteran physician who explains how to make sense of the misinformation about COVID-19 that has flooded social media, how American cultural attitudes toward the pandemic differ from those in Asia, how COVID-19 affects its victims, and what data doctors are looking for about the pandemic, how to keep from transmitting sickness to health workers, how the pandemic has affected travel, and how travelers can stay healthy moving forward.
How to make sense of health data in a time of pandemic (and beyond)
In this episode of Deviate, Dr. JP Santiago talks about how the “existential threat” of pandemic is changing the way family-practice doctors are dealing with patients right now; the definition of “observer bias”; a history of the shortcomings and dangers of naming infectious diseases after animals, people, or geographical places; how capitalism can be a force that can both enable and compromise solutions during a pandemic; and Dr. Santiago’s advice on how people should respond to the pandemic.
Note: I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page. To learn more about what this blog is all about, read items #2 and #3 from my update post.
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