Coronavirus: Models & being ‘led by the science’; Mars500 isolation tips; Kids’ science - singing glasses

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Marnie Chesterton reveals how important the models and graphs are in informing government strategies for the Covid-19 pandemic. Christl Donnelly, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology at Imperial College London and Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford, and Dr Kit Yates, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath and author of 'The Maths of Life and Death', explain what epidemiological models can and can’t tell us about the progression of the disease, infection rates and death rates, and how testing will provide the essential data to make these models more accurate. They also give their take on the current inundation of social media with graphs and infographics created by non-epidemiologists - the ‘epidemic of armchair epidemiologists’. The European Space Agency’s Diego Urbina was one of the Mars500 participants. He spent 520 days in a human mission to Mars, shut up in a fake spacecraft with his fellow astronauts. So who better to get tips for home isolation from? Are you stuck in with the kids and want to try some science experiments that you can do at home? The Royal Institution is about to launch ExpeRimental Live - a live stream of home science experiments, designed to educate, entertain and inform your children with some cheap and easy science. And its existing ExpeRimental series of short films for parents are already available online. They were produced and directed by science teacher and writer Alom Shaha, who helps BBC Inside Science producer Jennifer Whyntie to have a go at making singing wine glasses with her children. Producers - Fiona Roberts and Jennifer Whyntie

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.2	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know I also know that comedy is really
0:24.4	subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer
0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you
0:36.2	fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:41.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:46.0	Hello and welcome to this, the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4.
0:51.0	It was first broadcast on the 2nd of April 2020. I'm Marnie Chesterton.
0:57.0	This week we're looking at an unexpected outbreak, a common side effect of COVID-19, the epidemic of armchair epidemiology.
1:07.0	Around the globe people are crunching numbers and making forecasts about the spread and danger caused by this virus.
1:14.0	In the UK, we can trace this back to around the 16th of March
1:18.0	when a single scientific study had an extraordinary impact on government policy and all of our lives.
1:25.0	Researchers at Imperial College London released a paper suggesting that unless the government altered its early mitigation strategy,
1:32.0	over a quarter of a million people would die in a catastrophic
1:35.7	epidemic of COVID-19. By Monday the 20th of March we were in lockdown.
1:41.2	Inside Science wants to take a look inside the machinery at how the pandemic is being
1:47.1	modeled and the problems that can arise with that. Joining me to talk graphs on the radio are Crystal Donnelly, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology
1:56.4	at Imperial College London and Professor of Applied Statistics at Oxford University.
	...

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