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Doctors Find Instant YouTube Fame During the Coronavirus
Even Dr. Pimple Popper is tackling the coronavirus
Dr. Franz Wiesbauer could not believe what he was seeing.
It was the middle of February, and the Diamond Princess cruise ship was idling in port in Japan. On board, the number of passengers infected with the novel coronavirus was steadily climbing: first 10, then 200, then more than 600 cases. And as Wiesbauer looked on from his home in Austria, a slinking thought grew ever more pronounced in the forefront of his mind.
“‘Shit,’ I thought. When I saw how fast that virus spread within that ship, it was kind of scary,” he recalls.
Within weeks the coronavirus spread from China and across Asia, Europe, and the United States. So Wiesbauer, a trained internist and epidemiologist, did what he thought any doctor with a YouTube channel should do: He made a video. And it blew up.
“I made a video about flattening the curve and became famous,” he says. “I get calls from media now on a daily basis. There was never a time when a layperson was so interested to learn the stuff we have to tell.”
