In deciding to host a half-hour chat on Instagram Live with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Stephen Curry wanted to help alert the country of the growing threat of the coronavirus and how to battle it.
If you’ve gotten the attention of Barack Obama, you have a lot of people’s attention.
The Warriors superstar and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases talked all things related to COVID-19 in public on Thursday. Fauci has become the leading voice on the pandemic, taking questions at the White House and now making the rounds through different media to try to appeal to all different audiences.
More than 50,000 viewers tuned in for the discussion, including Obama, Justin Bieber and, more locally, Andre Iguodala and Leandro Barbosa.
“Listen to the science. Do your part and take care of each other,” Obama wrote in the chat.
The aim of the conversation was to get word to fans of Curry about social distancing and COVID-19 awareness, and Curry asked about the difference between the virus and the common flu.
“The reason it’s different is that it’s very much more transmissible than flu and more importantly, it’s significantly more serious,” Fauci said. “The world mortality of seasonal flu, that you and I confront every year, is about 0.1 percent. The overall mortality of coronavirus is about 1 percent. In China, it was up to 2-3 percent. Which means it’s at least 10 times more serious than the typical influenza.”
Curry, who clearly researched his questions as Fauci implored the world to wash its hands and practice social distancing, was trying his hand in the science community. Meanwhile, Fauci appeared in front of a basketball hoop.
Fauci said the disease is “very heavily weighted toward the elderly and those with underlying conditions,” but that does not mean the young should not fear it.
“What we’re starting to see is that there are some people who are younger — people your age, young, healthy, vigorous — who don’t have any underlying conditions, who are getting seriously ill,” Fauci said. “It’s still a very, very small minority, but it doesn’t mean that young people like yourself should say, ‘I’m completely exempt from any risk of getting seriously ill.’
“And that’s the reason why when we talk about being careful of physical distancing, doing the kind of social separation, it means not only for the elderly, but the young people have to do it, too, for two reasons. One, you need to protect yourself because you’re not completely exempt from serious illness. But two, you can become the vector, or the carrier of infection where you get infected, you feel well, and then you inadvertently and innocently pass it onto your grandfather or your grandmother or your uncle who’s on chemotherapy for cancer. That’s what we got to be careful of.”