This story originally aired on April 20, 2019. In spite of the cranes on the skyline, there are still a few visible markers of Seattle as it was — old houses, old alleyways, a pergola that’s been knocked down but always gets put back up. The people who live here or visit always seem to be reaching out to grasp it, that oldness. I felt like that too, when I moved to Seattle a decade ago. I wanted to know what it was like then. Whenever then was. I began gobbling up materials, skulking through

This story originally aired on April 20, 2019. Back in the early 1990s, all eyes were on Seattle. The local music scene was exploding. The young, flannel-wearing creatives of the Northwest had given birth to a new genre of music called grunge.

Today’s episode: Learning as we go. The thing that makes COVID-19 so tricky is its newness. It’s a disease that literally did not exist in humans until a few months ago. There was no handbook for treating it, no established way to screen for it and, as has become painfully clear, no detailed protocols for how doctors should handle the waves of sick patients. That has meant that health workers at virtually every point on the spectrum — from paramedics to primary-care doctors to ICU specialists —

The fire chief in Point Roberts, Washington, is hoping to test hundreds of people in his community for COVID-19, regardless of whether they have symptoms. Using tests from Northwest Laboratory in Bellingham, Whatcom County Fire District 5 Chief Christopher Carleton hopes he can get at least 400 people in this 1,200-person community to take a test. So far, Carleton says they’ve tested 137 people.

Can wildfires prepare you for a pandemic? The mayor of Twisp, in Washington state’s Methow Valley, says they can. In 2014, the Carlton Complex wildfire burned about 400 square miles near Twisp — an area roughly five times the size of Seattle. Then came the Okanogan Complex of fires the next year, burning some 476 square miles and killing three firefighters and gravely injuring another — a staggering tragedy anywhere, but one that was acutely felt in the small community of about 1,000 residents.

You may have heard of the “Seattle Freeze.” It’s a tendency some people say longtime locals have to be cold toward newcomers. And many say the social-distancing measures now necessary because of the coronavirus are making it worse. Out in public, people seem scared to make eye contact with strangers. A pair of women in one of the city’s neighborhoods recently put on an event designed to warm things up a bit — despite the need to stay at least 6 feet apart from people you don’t live with.

We have all been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in our own ways. And the Sound Effect team has been doing our best to cover it in a new podcast called Transmission. Today on Sound Effect, we share some of the stories that have stood out to us from the podcast so far. First, we’ll meet a chef who has been riding around Tacoma on his bike yelling at people’s houses . Then, we get a blow-by-blow look at how the novel coronavirus takes over our cells. A repurposed mammogram van administers

People who have recovered from COVID-19 get some level of immunity to the virus. Now scientists at the University of Washington are set to start testing people for past infection.

Paul Taub is a retired flute teacher. He also plays professionally around the Seattle area. And his years of playing a wind instrument have put him particularly in tune with how his lungs work. Still, when he developed a cough, a fever, and some chills, he just thought it was a cold.

Today’s episode: Confronting Mortality. This is not something a lot of us are used to thinking much about. Dreading, sure. Avoiding, you bet. But thinking hard about it, and what it means during a time like this — not easy. In this episode, we connect with people who have gotten intimate with mortality. Robb Miller is the former executive director of End of Life Washington , and he’s also lived with HIV for more than two decades. He talks through what it means to have a good death, and how the