What does the science say about the COVID risks of schools reopening? Dolphin ear autopsy

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the next couple of weeks almost all children in the UK will be back to school. But the pandemic hasn’t ended, and we are far from having a complete understanding of how this virus works, including how it is transmitted and how it affects younger people. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that kids need to be back at school, as the costs of not being physically in classrooms are great - for the education of kids, for their mental health, and for the finances of parents needing to work. But what does the science say about the risks for schools reopening? Will we see a rise in infections in younger people, and hot-spots for the wider community? Adam Rutherford discusses these issues with Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine at Norwich Medical School, and he finds out from Professor Tim Spector if his Kings College COVID symptom tracker app can shed any more light on whether children display the same COVID symptoms as adults, or could we be missing infections in the young? Marnie Chesterton eavesdrops on an aquatic autopsy. We pollute the oceans with noise that has some serious effects on marine life. Remotely via video link up, Marnie witnesses a complex autopsy on the inner ear of a dolphin. She discovers how accurately the death of the sensory hair cells in a cetacean’s ear records the time of damage. Presenter – Adam Rutherford Producer – Fiona Roberts

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.
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0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
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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 you, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4,
0:49.5	first broadcast on the 27th of August 2020. I'm Adam Rutherford. The endless summer draws to a close and
0:56.1	children in England are going back to school in the next couple of weeks. In Northern Ireland
1:00.4	and Scotland they are already back in classrooms.
1:02.8	But the pandemic, you might have noticed, hasn't ended, and we are far from having a complete
1:07.1	understanding of how this virus works, how it's transmitted, how it affects younger people, and so on.
1:12.3	Despite the plethora of guidelines and
1:14.5	advice from government we're getting conflicting messages on things like
1:17.8	face masks. So today we're devoting most of this edition of Inside Science to unpicking how to get schools open and safe.
1:26.0	We're also eavesdropping on an aquatic autopsy.
1:29.0	The noise we pollute the oceans with has some serious effects on marine life and you can
1:33.8	probably hear some noise pollution as we record this from my home so we're
	...

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