163 - Sports Safety and COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As some schools and leagues resume play among youths, how can parents assess which activities are safer than others? Dr. Tara Kirk Sell—an expert from the Center for Health Security and an Olympic silver medalist in swimming—talks with Stephanie Desmon about how to think about levels of risk in different sports both on and off the field or court, how pro sports teams are thinking through safety, and how they can be messengers for public health. Sell also discusses why, with so many activities deemed nonessential, watching and participating in sports are important for our well-being.
KEYWORDS: athletes; college; student life
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.7 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health |
| 0:32.7 | officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast |
| 0:47.8 | episodes. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Tara Kirksell of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. |
| 0:56.8 | They discuss COVID-19 and sports, including the safety of specific sports, whether we should let our kids play and the risks for fans. |
| 1:06.7 | Let's listen. |
| 1:08.6 | Tara Kirksell, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:11.3 | Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. |
| 1:13.3 | So we're going to talk today about sports and COVID, and I want a little fun fact here. |
| 1:18.0 | You're actually, we're an Olympic silver medalist in swimming. Is that right? |
| 1:22.0 | Yeah, that's true. |
| 1:23.5 | So you have some COVID knowledge and some real genuine sports knowledge here. Yeah, COVID and sports |
| 1:29.3 | is like my specialty area of only a few people. Excellent. Excellent. So we have, you know, |
| 1:36.1 | a lot of questions about safety, right? And so I sort of like to start maybe with sort of the youngest |
| 1:40.2 | among us. And like, for example, my son is a high school cross-country runner, and he's |
| 1:45.6 | facing a canceled season. Feels to me like running is safe, but I'm curious your thoughts on |
| 1:52.4 | on that, and could he be running safely? Well, so I hesitate to say anything is completely safe, |
| 1:58.8 | right? Because we know that there are always risks, |
... |
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