Invisible Allies

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As scientists have been scrambling to find new and better ways to treat covid-19, they’ve come across some unexpected allies. Invisible and primordial, these protectors have been with us all along. And they just might help us to better weather this viral storm.

To kick things off, we travel through time from a homeless shelter to a military hospital, pondering the pandemic-fighting power of the sun. And then, we dive deep into the periodic table to look at how a simple element might actually be a microbe’s biggest foe.

This episode was reported by Simon Adler and Molly Webster, and produced by Annie McEwen, Pat Walters, Simon Adler, and Molly Webster, with production help from Tad Davis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Chad Abumarhan, this is Radio Lab, so last week we did a big episode about the
0:23.2	1918 flu thinking about this invisible enemy.
0:27.2	This week we've got two stories about a couple of invisible allies.
0:31.4	Okay, well, and we're going to kick things off with producer Simon Adler.
0:35.9	So we're going to start at a homeless shelter in Boston called the Pine Street Inn.
0:41.0	Hey, Jim, Simon here from Radio Lab.
0:43.3	Oh, Simon, how are you?
0:45.3	Thank you for calling.
0:46.3	That's an effect.
0:47.3	Oh, yeah.
0:48.3	How are you?
0:49.3	Does now still work for you?
0:51.9	Yeah, no, no, it worked.
0:53.8	And a very busy doctor there, Dr. Jim O'Connell.
0:57.0	Internal medicine doc at MGH and the president of the Boston Health Care for the homeless
1:01.0	program.
1:02.0	And he says, back this past winter, as this wave of COVID-19 was making its way towards
1:07.1	North America, he and everybody in this community of healthcare providers who work with the
1:13.3	homeless were freaked.
1:14.8	You know, really good measures for controlling this is to physically distance and to quarantine,
1:21.4	wash your hands frequently and to shelter at home.
1:24.2	And when you crawl into our perspective of being a homeless person or homeless provider,
	...

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