Trevor Noah (left) and Trevor Bedford (right). (Comedy Central Photo; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Photo, used with permission)

Trevor, meet Trevor.

Trevor Noah, “The Daily Show” host and South African comedian, came through Seattle last week on tour at Climate Pledge Arena. And he also recently visited online with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists, chatting with namesake Trevor Bedford — a celebrity in his own right, in the world of science.

Bedford has been at the forefront COVID-19 research since the start of the pandemic. He’s known for his work with the Seattle Flu Study, which uncovered evidence of widespread regional COVID-19 transmission in early 2020 by testing samples without the approval of slow-moving government agencies. The testing alerted the community and helped fend off a worse early outbreak in the Pacific Northwest.

Throughout the pandemic, Bedford has been a steady scientific voice, with his exact explanations of data on his popular Twitter feed. He co-developed the open-source platform Nextstrain, which creates real-time virus “family trees,” and his lab is constantly assessing viral behavior and evolution. He recently was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant, with $625,000 in unrestricted funding.

Noah spoke with Bedford as part of a Fred Hutch webcast Tuesday. The pre-recorded conversation did not address the new COVID-19 variant Omicron, but Fred Hutch director Thomas Lynch asked Bedford about it during a live Q&A portion at the end of the event. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Trevor Noah: I always believed that the word Trevor was the reason you become smarter as a person, and really puts you on track to become a genius … what does it feel like to be a verified genius?

Trevor Bedford: I have a very particular set of skills, and the events of the world just happened to align with that. It’s been a struggle to keep up with everything the last couple of years, but great to be able to play a role.

TN: You’ve developed some of the most complicated models to try and figure out what a virus is likely to do, how it is likely to spread. What do you think people missed with coronavirus that you didn’t?

TB: In late January and early February 2020 some of the early modeling of how transmissible it is, and how many other infections one infection causes, and how severe it is, came in. And once those numbers were there, it was pretty clear what would happen. And it was fairly easy to realize, “we’re actually now on planet B.” And so much of the world still thought,“we’re on planet A.” And it was just trying to convince people, “this is the reality that we’re in now.”

TN: You are one of the few people on social media who is not followed for their body, but rather for their brain. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that you were one of the first people to spot the first case of coronavirus in Washington.

TB: There was this period in February 2020, when there was this massive struggle to try to get testing up and running, and we had the samples, but we were being told not to test them. And then when we did anyway, we discovered community transmission. By genome sequencing the virus, we were able to tell that we were at about 1,000 infections in at that point, rather than one.

TN: I was proud to learn that South Africa has really been instrumental in helping with the work. Often when you hear about what’s happening, it’s always through the lens of, “America’s doing this.”

TB: The story in South Africa has been pretty amazing, a group there has been at the forefront of genomic surveillance and sequencing throughout the pandemic. Their discovery of Beta led to flagging and predicting of a mutation that allowed discovery of Alpha in the UK. And so, it’s really that work in South Africa that opened the eyes of the world to these variant viruses. (Researchers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa also raised alarm about the new Omicron variant in a press conference last week.)

“People need to realize that it’s going to be around forever. Just like we have flu season every year, there will be COVID season.”

TN: What do you think we’re missing right now in the conversation about COVID?

TB: People need to realize that it’s going to be around forever. Just like we have flu season every year, there will be COVID season. So, it’s going to be a thing that we have to deal with every year, working on better vaccines, on better ventilation and antivirals, and on all of the things that that will entail. But it’s not that there will be a post-COVID time where we can say, “The pandemic is over, we don’t think about it anymore.” It will be something that every winter we at least will have to deal with to some degree.

TN: The conversation in America has gotten really complicated because of social media, mistrust in science, etc. … You’re trying to explain something that can mutate and change in how we understand it. What do you think people struggle to grasp, particularly with the coronavirus?

TB: So much of it is that science is turning over, things have been super rapid. There’s been all kinds of preprints (studies released early without peer review), rather than waiting for publication. And there’s a lot of turnover in the understanding. I do think uncertainty has been really hard to deal with.

TN: On a lighter note, what are you planning to do with that grant money? It’s got to be something cool that you’re planning.

TB: I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other big new projects. The main thing is building on this software platform that we have (Nextstrain) for tracking spread of viruses and other pathogens.

Thomas Lynch: Tell us where we are today with Omicron, what does it mean? What are you thinking about? What do we know and what do we not know right now?

TB: So, this feels unfortunately a bit like January 2020 all over again. But now, it’s like we all get to freak out at the same time. If you just look at this new variant Omicron, the number of mutations in the spike protein is kind of wild. (Omicron has about 30 mutations in the spike protein, which binds human cells, compared about eight to 10 for other variants). We’re also seeing evidence of rapid local spread in South Africa and particularly in the Gauteng province. These two things together have people very concerned for good reason.

I’d expect to understand a lot more in about two weeks, once we have these functional assays in (key to assessing how well the vaccines will work), and we’ll have two weeks of surveillance data to see actually how it plays out. And it’ll probably take a month at least to have good evidence of severity. I don’t think we can say anything yet and it will take time for that data to come in. It could be more mild, it could be more severe. We just don’t know.

RELATED: COVID-19 experts answer questions about Omicron — and where the variant may have come from

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