Today we're off to Iceland, one of my favorite countries
which has been at the very leading edge of
the Coronavirus testing.
There is a company there called deCODE genetics,
which has been looking at
the Icelandic population's genomes for about 25 years.
When the virus hit, they very quickly started testing
just about everyone they could,
not just people who were sick,
but a random sampling of Icelanders.
They've come up with some of the biggest insights we have
on the virus.
Let's hit Iceland and talk to the CEO of deCODE genetics.
Do you mind just introducing yourself?
My name is Kári Stefánsson,
and I'm the founder and CEO of deCODE genetics.
You had one of the most ambitious testing programs.
You've tested I think it's about 10% of the population?
10.5% of the population.
10.5.
So it sounded like at first, anybody who wanted a test
could sign up and apply for one, and then you went
to this more random process where you,
I think you literally went through
the phone book and kind of picked people.
We started to test on January 31st,
and the healthcare system tested
for 28 days before finding the first patient.
We started to screen in a population in general
on March the 13th.
And we have already screened about 10% of the population.
We have determined that on average, during this time
that we've screening, about .8% of the population
has been infected by the virus,
but that number has been coming down.
We have sequenced the virus
from every single person infected.
And that first generated a very interesting picture.
So if you look worldwide,
there is a tremendous collections
of mutations in this virus.
So in this patterns of mutations,
you have about a barcode,
and having the sequence of the virus
from everyone infected gives us an opportunity
to determine the country of origin of
the infection in all of the infected in Iceland.
Another thing that you can do with this sequence is
that you can use it to trace the infection in Iceland.
You can figure out who was infected from whom.
So if you were diagnosed with an infection,
we can in an instant, find all of the smartphones
that within one or two meters from your smartphone over
the past five days, which is somewhat scary.
Yeah.
It sounds like considerable invasion of privacy.
But when you are looking a beast like this in the eyes,
you have to use whatever you have.
You know because Iceland is relatively contained,
because you were so aggressive with your testing
and tracing, I mean you didn't go on to the same lockdown
as some of the other countries.
Explain to me what lockdown looked like a month ago
and what it looks like now as a result of all the testing
that you've been able to do and all the tracing.
We really don't have a lockdown.
We don't have a curfew.
We have the ban on gathering more than 20 people.
We are insisting that we should keep social distance
of two meters.
We have our elementary school are open,
the childcare centers are open, the stores are open.
We are taking a very mild approach to this in general
but we have been very aggressive when it comes to
the specific approach to those infected
and been very aggressive in looking for them
by screening widely.
I think that the societal price for doing
this approach is much less,
there's a higher price than screening but that's trivial.
That's absolutely trivial.
I mean so this remains kinda shocking to me,
I mean like, how is it possible that we still do not
have widespread anti-body testing in places outside
of somewhere like Iceland?
I honestly, what surprises me the most
is that we don't have it in the United States,
because what we're doing here in Iceland is
what we've learnt in America, all right?
You have this unbelievably resourceful nation.
You have, you know, you have the 25, 50 best universities
in the world.
There does seem to be will here,
particularly among the universities.
Is some of this just down to the fact
that it's almost like a supply thing?
The reagents, the.
So much stuff has been tied up in China
and the supply chain, or do you really think this is
more of like a will-- ?
I am buying my reagents from the United States.
Okay.
It is not a reagent thing.
It is a complete lack of coordination.
There seems to be a complete inability to take advantage
of the fact that in an epidemic like this,
everyone wants to contribute.
You are so young, you may not remember,
but when Dukakis was running against Ronald Regan,
when Ronald Regan was running for re-election,
Dukakis said in one interview that
the fish rots from the head down.
I think that a lot of your problems begin
with your commander-in-chief.
Your company's so well known for,
obviously having these broad genetic models for working
on disease, I mean what else has stood out to you
about this particular virus?
You see, I've been involved with research into
a large number of diseases over the 42/3 years,
and usually when we begin to study a disease,
the first thing you have to figure out is
what questions have yet to be answered.
But when it comes to this disease, it falls into my lap
and all of the questions are unanswered.
If you look at people in general,
women are less likely to get infected than men,
and if women get infected they do not become as sick as men.
About two weeks ago, there were 10 people on respirators
at the National Hospital of Iceland.
Nine of them were men, just one woman.
Children are less likely to get infected than adults,
and if they get infected, they are less likely
to become sick.
There is an enormous diversity in the vulnerability
and it's really interesting to speculate on what
is it that what causes this clinical diversity.
There is something in the nature of the potential host
that is very important,
and I mean there are others all over
the world who are trying to figure out what it is.