Thank you for joining us for chasing COVID with Trevor Bedford.

Moderated by Hannah Weinberger.

Before we begin, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation Hello, and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Hannah Weinberger Crosscut Science and Environment Staff Reporter.

I cover the ways that people and wildlife are adapting to changing spaces and each other, which over the past few years has meant reporting on a world changing virus.

Today I am here to speak with someone intimately familiar with how that change happened.

When you hear about new coronavirus variants of concern , you likely have Dr. Trevor Bedford to thank for the early warning.

Dr. Bedford, a computational virologist and professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has helped people understand how the virus evolves and spread since early 2020.

Dr. Bedford never expected to be a science communicator, but a little over two years ago, when the world was in an information vacuum, he noticed the virus had likely been spreading undetected for weeks and fired up Twitter Since then, he has doggedly continued to share in near real time what researchers are learning about the virus's evolution, something he helps make possible as co-founder of the open source surveillance program NextStrain.

His efforts have earned him a MacArthur Genius grant, among other awards , and a new appreciation for the role of public information in managing public health.

Today, we get to chat with Dr. Bedford about his work tracking COVID.

His experience as a scientist during the pandemic and his role in communicating science around a complicated issue.

Dr. Bedford welcome Hi, Hannah.

Thank you for the introduction Absolutely.

So, Trevor, if I can call you that in your first test of science communication for the day?

How do you usually describe what you do as a computational virologist to people outside your field in a few sentences?

Oh boy.

So most of it is working with viral genome data.

So the corona virus genome has these 30000 letters and as it transmits from person to person, little mistakes are made just by the kind of act of that virus replicating.

Then you can take nose swabs from from people that are sick , sequence the virus out of them and then use the differences in that genome to reconstruct a family tree of those of how this virus is related and use that family tree to understand things about how the virus is spreading mutations that might be making it spread faster and kind of a lot of what's actually going on that is maybe hidden to looking at something like case counts or kind of broader data.

Oh, my gosh.

So I'm really sensitive to typos in my life, but it sounds like for you, they have a special meaning.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So did you view platforms like Twitter as public health information services before the pandemic?

Hmm.

So I then on Twitter, I think I joined in 2009 And that sounds right.

v. And maybe more active since 2011, There's there's been this thing of science Twitter for, you know, forever And that's actually been a really, really nice platform to kind of share papers.

Sure.

Other papers that you're reading and kind of there's a there's a nice scientific community.

And so that was that was entirely the entirety of my kind of real experience with Twitter.

And in January 2020, and then when the when things started to kick off, there was like a lot of scientists talking to each other in science, Twitter that then kind of ballooned out to, you know, to a much larger, much lecture thing after that, right?

So it sounds like kind of this this bubble, that's for work, but it exists in this larger platform form.

So thinking back to early 2020 was your intention to be sharing information with the entire public or did you stumble into that role?

Yeah, it was.

There's absolutely stumbling.

And it was also like where I can think of some specific tweets for like, there There were some early work looking at kind of serial interval and so forth.

And so copied a paper there and then realized that I needed to then explain what serial interval means and so forth.

And because there were people listening in and then trying to kind of even if the kind of foremost target might be other scientists of, then trying to kind of make it fully or understandable as possible while still keeping things terse to to people who aren't kind of professionals, right So, you know, it sounds like you were already there, but there's this whole new set of eyes because of the nature of the moment, and you've been talking shop with other academics and researchers , and you found yourself in a position to share with everyone Apart from thinking about, you know, in two hundred and forty characters or so communicating like how else does this change an audience in the Twitter format affect the way you communicate?

Mm hmm.

Yeah, it's been.

It's like, yeah, I've really liked it as basically a blog format and kind of thinking of Twitter as microblog and can throughout the pandemic.

If I'm interested in a particular topic like case reporting rate or something and I want you to look into it and then it makes something where I can.

I can spend a week looking into things.

Spend a couple of hours writing up a Twitter thread about it Share that with with the world , but it's like mentors for every man.

For colleagues , meant for the world and meant for kind of media as well.

And it's something that that it's like, I feel like comfortable to talk about this thing with with others.

If you want to get in in contact, right?

So noticing that you have this new audience looking at you.

What made you want to lean into that role of a kind of pseudo public science communicator?

Hmm.

Yeah.

Um, so so it it was mostly especially early on of just how how terrible the information and kind of ecosystem was where we have like snake flu and things like this that are that are circulating widely And so, yeah, the first the first bite of this was the HIV inserts, preprints, that that was, uh, kind of, you know, fairly poorly done and and but then was immediately circulating widely.

And so then kind of felt need to to respond to that and kind of show like why you know, why this is this is flawed And that immediately kind of was more, yeah, more popular than other, you know, other things that I was I was tweeting about at the time And so that's then stayed since, yeah, since then of like trying to like generally the you know, generally the information ecosystem has improved since January 2020, but it's still like there's huge amounts of questions that everyone has about the fact 212 that one Then you can try to like, dig into papers and archive or whatever But it's helpful to have scientists actually kind of giving some some summary of what they what they think is going on right, especially scientists who really appreciate how quickly things can develop and spread and , you know, take ownership of the conversation like viruses do.

So you have access to a lot of information that people want.

How do you decide what to share?

Yeah.

So there's some there's like it's a combination of things that I'm interested in So I mentioned the case reporting rate as something that I was curious to dig into for a week and then other things that are like in the media or particularly, I'm getting repeated emails from NIH, CDC, reporters or whatever on on 11:58 12.1.

And so rather than trying to respond in detail to everyone , instead, it's more efficient to to make a make a thread and kind of have that be be shared Wow.

So you mostly have been speaking with researchers before all of this.

Who is the audience that you want and who is the audience that you think you have Yeah, I think that that the audience that I want and maybe think I have are people that they they for most of the things that I'm writing, they probably need a bachelor's in biology, sort of sort of thing.

I'm not It's it's too hard to talk about things like, well, antigenic drift.

And so forth.

If like if, if I were to try to make it for everyone, it would it would balloon out where you'd have to write essays to kind of explain actually, what's you know , what's going on?

And I haven't felt like I could commit that level of time, and I would probably be better for for a blog than than Twitter anyway.

I don't know.

I see you going on Tik Tok with whatever is in your kitchen and being like today, we're going to do answer genetic drift or yeah, yeah, maybe , maybe later.

And so , yeah, and then so.

So then relying on on it to be concise and as accurate as possible with that which scientific jargon helps with and then kind of that can get can get picked up by reporters and explained or by others and and explain more and not trying to.

Yeah, not trying to do the as broad of science science communication as as you might imagine Did you see yourself in that role immediately or have you been trying to toe the line between sharing information that scientifically accurate but not so jargony that people haven't found it useful?

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's like it.

I would if if the Twitter following was smaller, and like still the scientists, that would be easy to just be completely in in the on the jargon side of things have tried to make things more accessible with the kind of as the as the following increased um and I do pay attention.

It is helpful having people responding and I can see kind of where, you know, where it didn't line up and where where the point that I was trying to make maybe wasn't was not caught by a large number of people at all.

Well, it just really does anything come to mind that's going to be that's going to be hard Like , yeah, throughout.

There's a number of things like throughout out of like infections versus cases and trying to trying to kind of make it very clear to people that when we talk about cases, we're not talking about all the infections that are happening and and so forth.

And so there's like then language to be to be very careful with there in terms of what , yeah, what's actually happening?

Right, right.

You know, I covered this for a year and a half, and I still catch myself calling the virus COVID.

So I totally appreciate that you have to be really sensitive when you're talking to people who haven't been in school for as many years as you and spending their time tracking this kind of stuff And you touched on this a little bit, but there's a lot of misinformation on the internet.

Does the for knowledge that what you share may get contextualized in a way that you are maybe nervous about affect the way that you communicate with the public?

or people in public health or policy?

Yeah, this is this is a huge issue for the pandemic , where , where, where I've ended up like at the very yeah, let's let's start from the beginning.

So in early 2020, I like others, I was it felt like it felt like the CDC or the W.H.O.

should be the one like like raising this huge alarm and that it's not.

They're not the like individuals scientist role to do.

You say like this is, you know, they're this pandemic is coming, but then it seemed like their CDC W.H.O.

at all were were overly concerned about a like scaring people when people should have been should have been scared.

And that might then reflect on how commerce has been done by by public health since then, where like it's been, there's been like always trying to think two steps ahead of like we want people to to to wear masks.

So we're going to to talk about how good we're not going to talk about how much better and 95 SARS than cloth masks because we were afraid that not everyone getting 95 adding that like like rather than just being just completely on it with the the scientific accuracy.

And so, so with what I've done is is trying, you know, trying to be fully scientific, accurate at scientifically accurate , trying not to think two steps ahead Though it has meant that for things that I'm not fully kind of an expert in, that I will tend not to not to engage in that side of it because I don't like I don't feel confidence and and in that in that topic.

But yeah, on things, on things that I am confident of, just of just going with the idea, only thinking for accuracy rather than thinking about the comms If only more of us didn't weigh in on things we understand sometimes.

So it sounds like, you know, does this make you think about the value of transparency So, um yeah, And this is this is this is hugely important through the pandemic and that the that having scientists be b just acting in their role as scientists and trying to And also also having, yeah, having things be this this Um.

Well, yeah, let's take a step back.

We're like, it's it's been it's felt way better to have the analyses that we're doing up for the world on NextStrain dot org, where then I can point to point fellow scientists to.

But other people can, you know, are welcome to look at it.

It gets there.

There's a number of people that will be confused, but that's like, That's OK.

It's good that the information is, is there and the same thing with kind of the maybe the public health reporting where like or where it's been better to right to like rather than like having a reporting chain up to local state national public health that it's like technical reports or whatever.

And that's only seen by this small group of people easier to to post things on to on Twitter and then kind of then share share that with with these groups.

And that way things are yeah, things aren't aren't gated, right?

So kind of a collective learning experience and realizing that having the information out there, regardless of everyone's level of science literacy, will help move the ball forward and hopefully people will find people who can answer their questions.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's just it's been much, much easier and better to have.

Have things be as public as as possible.

And then, yeah, even if the intended audience is not the entire public right And so you have all this information out there now , what kind of responses do you usually get Mm hmm.

So, yeah, so it's in terms of Twitter posting a new thing that it's the normal URL, I think issue with the platform and probably any of the social media platforms where you can get a thousand likes But the things that you notice are the there's like the recent recent post about, yeah, data at 12 P, I talked to that 12.1 where we have half of people saying that, that I'm minimizing long COVID and like minimizing by saying it has flu like drift that it's comparing to flu And then that's going, you know, that's horrible.

And how could you do this And the other half saying like COVID is over.

Why, you know, why are you trying to scare us , your fear mongering?

And so there's like , if you know, if things are are at a pretty good place , I have a roughly equal number of people shouting at me from one one side and and from the other side.

Have you ever regretted engaging with the public No, I think the the regret might just be now there's this freighted with responsibility to do that.

Keep things up and to to to do a good job with this, but not the not the actual act , right?

I want to talk with you a little bit about information sharing and science as well But before we get there, did you ever expect to be talking about a social media platform with regard to your work this much No, definitely not.

I think I would.

I would note that, yeah, that that this theme that resulted in NextStrain dot org and kind of having something that's public and real time and like , we want analyses shared as quickly and openly as possible is is the same kind of underlying motivation that is pushing for the kind of Twitter analyses So that's definitely been there.

Yeah, but the the like, how heavily heavily inflect it things are with social media was definitely not not expected, right?

And so with all of these responses, and the public and public health out there, seeing all this information that you're putting out there, does that affect how you think about yourself as a scientist or how you do science Yeah.

Um, I think that what's been tricky here for everyone is that pandemic has moved so quickly that that generally you want to do thorough , accurate science.

Peer review really helps with this But by the time the paper comes out, it's often the thing that , like you really wanted to address, is no longer, no longer.

It's as as relevant.

And so, so then we can kind of push towards faster preprints.

And that's been, I think, an actual , you know, really good thing for scientific understanding of the pandemic.

At an even more than that, if we have something that like is happening today or something that pushing for something like Twitter or something, something that's kind of where a technical report that's not not even not even to the level of a preprint, but being able to have scientific research happen in a faster pace than what's been kind of the traditional slower but more accurate form of things , right?

Does putting so much information out there in preprint form where science is kind of iterating on itself rapidly?

Do you think that that's affecting how the public understands what science is Yeah, I'd hope so.

I think that I really didn't like and still don't like the d like standard way that things would happen would be for the in terms of public consumption that the scientific process happens, paper bounces back and forth and peer review it's hidden away.

Then it gets published.

Ethernet attended with a university press release , and then it's reported on from the press release.

Generally, not from the paper.

And then and then it's taken as truth because it's like gone through this.

This process where an often b often to be wrong, quite often be wrong and now now I think people realize how with preprints and all of this, that like this reported on finding is not necessarily true or this particular paper is not necessarily true, and it might.

I am I'm sure it's more confusing for for the non-scientists , but that's that's perhaps like more of a and more of an accurate understanding of actually kind of how scientists are approaching things as well.

Right.

It's my job to read your preprints and your papers and not the press release to try to figure out what questions to ask you so I can explain it better.

It's not all on you.

So a quick reminder for our audience to make sure to get your questions in the chat section because we will be asking some of them soon.

But before then getting to your scientific work, NextStrain has accomplished some incredible stuff.

How has the pandemic changed the way that you view open data's role in the future of medicine?

Mm-Hmm.

Yeah, I think that the that genomic sequence data, there's been a real push here in the last five ish years that has been pretty remarkable All of going from back.

And I think like the inflection point was really the West African Ebola epidemic, whereas before that the standard practice would be there'd be an outbreak, there'd be samples collected things.

It was heart too hard to do the sequencing and in real time enough to actually inform understanding of the outbreak and instead, you'd end up with a paper a year after the year after the outbreak happened and then you'd release the sequence data.

Then again, with Ebola and Zika, and then very much with with COVID, a kind of a push to just share the sequence data immediately.

And this has been at then it's allowed allowed things like NextStrain.

But then we have a bunch of other other endeavors like Kova, Spectrum and Covariance in outbreak dot info and so forth.

that are relying on data that are shared very generously by producers all over the world, curated by folks that get it and CVI.

And really like, there's a fantastic ecosystem here now.

Part of what's worked well with that is like each genome viral genome.

Is this very kind of granular thing that that like you have those 30000 letters and you have some very obvious metadata too attached to it of when it was collected and where it was collected.

So it makes kind of pooling that information pretty, pretty straightforward in a way that if you were to have other scientific data , it's not often as easy to do that.

That pooling from a bunch of different bunch of different groups.

And so this is as we've been sticking stuff up our nose for a couple of years that we're able to get this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And and the the variant, the worry, legitimate worry about the variants kind of really push things as well, where in 2020 there was pretty good sequence data, but it wasn't at all like it became in 2020. one when we had the variants of concern emerge and then each country started Really, countries across the world started really funding the sequencing efforts.

Right.

And so on that note, you have, you know, proof of concept for why this kind of surveillance can be really helpful at the same time, you know?

Well, we're reading news articles about the point for Bay Point five.

We're kind of reeling back a lot of the surveillance and tracing that we've been doing the past few years.

What are we still missing when it comes to the data collection we do to keep tabs on the virus in the US?

Like, can we improve?

Yeah.

So throughout the pandemic, but especially in kind of this genomic side, we've really relied heavily on U.K. and Denmark, probably more than in terms of the in terms of the actual kind of connection to epidemiology.

South Africa has been amazing with the kind of early warnings and detection the U.S. is doing a really good job sequencing kind of.

We have as much sequencing as anyone But because the way the U.S. public health system works , it's really hard to take that nasal swab that was this confirmed case and actually connect it back to like knowing their vaccination history and even knowing their age or even knowing if it was the hospitalized case or they they may have died later.

And because because of how fractured the health care system is, you can't do these large scale analyses in the U.S. the way that you can in, say, the U.K., where they have everything connected because of their health system.

And and so that's made it hard to know things specifically for the U.S. like right now, is baked to 12.1.

That's spreading quite rapidly Is that spreading because people are getting reinfected that were infected in the initial Omicron wave with P.1?

Or is it due to intrinsic transmissibility increase and the people that are largely getting baked due to 12.1 weren't people were Were other people that weren't getting infected and that didn't get infected in their initial Macron with.

Right.

So if you managed to socially distance, we're talking about transmissibility.

You know, maybe you're still susceptible because you don't have the antibodies that you need right now.

So could we do this?

Improved surveillance Like what would we need to get there?

Yeah, there the strategies that that have worked in the U.S., I think getting something out of a national scale is probably impossible at the moment.

The strategies that work at a smaller scale are kind of state level or jurisdictional.

A kind of county level where you can A confirmed case is reported to public health say to Washington Department of Health, and then they're able to connect it up to the sequencing that's happening in the states at Washington Public Health Labs, but also at University of Washington and the body , which then has a database that actually has that connection.

And it's it's a lot of a lot of work on their part to get that, to get that happening.

And the other way that I've seen this is through like Kaiser Permanente in California has some really good papers for having the HMO where they have kind of all of the data they can actually connect things as as well.

So locally , we're doing OK.

It sounds like, yeah, Washington is is in a really good place with kind of with with their genomic surveillance side.

Right?

Given that though, you know where we are right now, what ideas or concerns are you most interested in communicating to people?

Interesting.

I think that that what's what's really going to be important and and we'll take a lot of work to figure out is kind of why are people immunologically why are people getting reinfected and the virus is going to keep evolving?

It's going to be like flu where people are going to get infected every every couple of years.

every year, something something quite quite common And as those reinfections occur, your immune system builds up kind of more and more antibodies that target different parts of the virus in different forms of the virus.

And we want to get through booster doses or vaccination kind of improved vaccination platforms a way to make a really broad, durable immune response that kind of keeps the virus from being able to to run away from it so easily and And we've like there have been pushes for a universal flu vaccine, which you may have heard that that one that term before, because this is this is this was the thing with flu for four decades.

And so it will it will still then be a, you know, a real push for for COVID to have vaccination.

That is, yeah, it's more more robust to evolution.

So can we make those vaccines fast enough to meet the the sequencing data So there is a strategy that that is probably what we'll end up with in the short term that isn't a bad strategy where we have enough sequencing data You can kind of know that right now, things are a this version of Omicron.

So then Maddern , a Pfizer, should start kind of swap the vaccines to that , then deploy those.

And in September, October and we can do that basically every every year.

What they like may or June sort of decision for a fall vaccination campaign And that should match pretty well.

But it won't always match perfectly if something is is emerging over the summer or if you have multiple circulating things And so, yeah, ideally, but it's more difficult.

You'd figure out some way to have to have multivalent vaccines that kind of include different versions , different forms of the virus, different forms of AD that would give you kind of a broader immune response that would be more just, yeah, more robust to to the ongoing evolution.

And that's that's a harder that's more of a challenge, but it is something that I'm sure like the field will be we'll be working on, right?

So sounds kind of like if I were to try to find an analogy in my own life When I go outside in Seattle, I wear lots of layers because I don't really quite know what the weather's going to be, so I have to be prepared for anything.

All right.

Yeah, that's fair.

OK?

What does it feel like when people ask you what's going to happen next?

Yeah, I I try to be.

I try not to get the information where I'm happy to happy to talk about what you know.

What I think is might be happening Yeah, it is like being freighted with their responsibility to kind of know, know what's what's happening Yeah.

Yeah.

And I've definitely been wrong Yeah, I don't know.

I don't have a great answer there.

No, no, no.

It's great.

I mean, like obviously, this is something that you really think about.

There's a lot of responsibility here And do people seem to expect you to say things with certainty?

Oh, no, I don't think so.

But I think they they definitely expect an answer Yeah, yeah.

And I think that conveying proper levels of uncertainty is one of the kind of more difficult things and any of the scientific scientific communication between scientists scientific communication out to the to the public Where, yeah, where that side of things is just so difficult to get right, even if you can kind of be in the right direction of like how yeah, how confident are you in this , this particular finding or this particular forecast Right.

And that's not what people want to hear in a crisis, but hopefully this may build up our our resilience to learning in the middle of an information vacuum So now, because I have to ask, you know, what's next Um yeah.

I think we we touched on that a bit earlier.

We're like, Uh, I think the general pattern will be something that's a little like flu, where where COVID evolves really quickly or SARS CoV2 evolves really quickly.

And like so far, if we look at look, look at it in terms of its sequence evolution and the part of the virus that really matters here and spike protein, it's evolving about twice as fast as the fastest seasonal flu virus it has.

It has it has significant more intrinsically transmissible.

So a flu infection where no one has immunity would probably infect two additional people.

Uh, whereas a COVID, a SARS-CoV-2 infection where where no one has immunity at this point would infect six ish other people.

And so those two things combined will just mean that COVID circulates more than flu every year.

However, with immunity that we have the infection fatality rate, the proportion of people who die from infection is is actually pretty comparable to seasonal flu at this.

At this point, So we have a situation where we can expect lots of COVID circulating at individual infections are likely to be mild and are probably not so harmful generally.

But there's enough infections happening that it will be a kind of a major major source of mortality and morbidity across the population.

Every, every winter.

Right.

So thank you so much, Trevor.

Before we run out of time, I want to get to some audience questions What's an example of something you've learned to communicate in a way that makes more sense to non-scientists or people outside your field?

Oh man.

Um, yeah, it don't.

I don't have a good answer there.

I think the the like simple thing that I started with of thinking about these , these typos, these mutations and as being able to understand a family tree and using that analogy, a family tree has really has really been been helpful as opposed to like the the initial push for more technical terms of like phylogeny or something like this, that it's yes, it's talking about.

This is like ancestry of the virus seems to.

That seems to make sense Interesting.

Who do you follow on Twitter that you think does a good job explaining the virus that regular folks might understand Um, yeah, I think that um, maybe maybe to answer this very um obliquely that the like my favorite Twitter follow is definitely is an app where she like And there's a couple other people like Michael Lin that that have generally been just OK thinking for themselves and then if if they have something that they believe that does not fit the the kind of prime their primary narrative about, say, aerosol transmission or or whatever it is that they're OK being being loud about it.

And then also like she's she's been right Even, you know, even with these things that are not , not necessarily, you know, always agreed on and yeah, and so, yeah, so people that are OK being being fairly outspoken, but also have a history of being incorrect about about these things.

Right?

So this next question relates to something you and I have chatted about a little bit before.

Is there a point where this extra job of communication and becomes a distraction from your quote unquote real job Yeah.

Um, so it it definitely depends on like what you what you're trying to accomplish where where the main the main thing that scientists are usually judged on and the thing that you're usually trying to do to push forward science is to write papers and to get a paper through peer review.

even have that as part of the literature and through the pandemic.

I think early on that that things were moving so quickly and the information vacuum was so intense that definitely the best thing to do was to be focusing on more of the media engagement and Twitter and so forth and trying to kind of help help everyone understand what's what's going on.

But then, as things have become less less of a crisis, it's been it's pushed me to like focus more on the paper side of things and do less on less on Twitter.

And and I can imagine that it's a kind of as a as a general thing that that there's there's real importance to having the kind of rigorous, accurate, peer reviewed science happen and that that kind of yeah, that you need, you need you need enough of both to to actually be useful here and as things continue to become, hopefully continue to become less, you know, less of a crisis, we can kind of push more towards the towards the paper side of things.

Right.

So it sounds like you kind of schedule your scientific life aligned with how crazy things are.

Yes.

Yes, very much.

Another audience question is, have you experienced pushback from fellow scientists and in what ways Yeah.

Um, I think that um, so the a fairly long story.

The the so the early on and in February 2020, when we had the initial sequence saying that we were doing with Seattle Flu Study of a viruses and in Washington state and in Seattle that we that we kind of managed to do that sequencing before before pretty much kind of anyone else was in the in the country Discover this a to virus and this community case and then that that from the mutations , it looked very much like it was directly descended from from the one and the kind of a simple statistical analysis had it as a three percent chance of this.

This resemblance, genomic resemblance being being possible if they were kind of independent introductions.

So then I had the the tweet saying that we have had cryptic transmission for the last six weeks.

That goes very far.

And and that turned out, I'm pretty certain, at this point to be wrong that it was it was a second introduction and that it was that three percent chance that that happens And I still think it was the right call to make from and even just from an accuracy perspective.

But when that paper was getting peer reviewed, one of the reviewers was was very , very adamant that it was completely inappropriate to be announcing this over over Twitter in a in a quote, freewheeling Twitter thread.

And so , yeah, so I think that that there is there was and I'm sure there still is kind of a number of scientists who would prefer things to not, you know, to be like And it is it is a spectrum or you don't want you'd like things to be more accurate and like things to be more Yeah, like it's it's a real tradeoff between being more accurate and being being fast.

And I think with all Twitter and all of this, I've been more on the the far side and have been have been wrong because of that on occasions.

Right.

But this is a kind of applied literature, right?

You know, you've noted that it's important to publish papers for the scientific literature, but for it to make an impact.

Sometimes this communication really matters, and it looks like we have run out of time Trevor, thank you so much for all the work you're doing to make information transparent for helping translate some complex stuff in ways that really benefit the rest of us.

There's one audience question that I think would be a great way to sign off for someone who does not use Twitter to get information.

How can people follow your research in real time if they're also maybe not someone who would use NextStrain?

Yeah.

Um, yeah, that's a really good question.

I don't.

I'm trying.

It's I'm thinking of there's there's there's not an obvious like there's so there's a lot of if you're in this like the weeds of this variant side, of things, they'll be all of these things like Cove Spectrum and Cove variants and like GitHub Discussion Board to talk about labeling the next Pango lineage.

You know, all of these things, but then like, there's not there's not like an obvious , yeah, I wish there was, but there's not an obvious like, go to this website and you'll you'll get a a kind of a layperson friendly description of what's happening with the the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

I think I would.

This is then , you know, fairly biased.

I have a couple of talks on my website at Bedford Dot Idaho If you go to the talk section that especially recent VBI talk that posted to YouTube, that will kind of give a give a fairly broad overview of what's going on.

It's I Brotman, Baty Institute , right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Excellent.

Thank you.

So much, Trevor.

Absolutely great.

Thanks to all of you on the other side of the screen, it's been a real pleasure having everyone here today and there are a ton of other sessions happening at the festival.

You can find them all at Crosscut dot com slash festival