 How do people catch coronavirus and how do you make them better? How long do you think the schools would be shut? Have we seen anything like this before? Welcome to World Versus Virus, a podcast from the World Economic Forum that aims to make sense of the COVID-19 outbreak. This week our guest is Ranj Singh, a TV doctor who specialises in communicating difficult medical subjects with young children. The star of the BBC show, Get Well Soon, takes questions from children ranging from 6 to 11 and gives grown-ups advice on how to talk to kids about COVID-19. Kind of gauge how much your child knows about it, ready on what their particular worries might be. You might be quite surprised they may not be worried at all, or they may be worried about something completely different from what we were expecting. Subscribe to World Versus Virus on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robin Pomeroy. Later we'll hear from vocal artist Reeps1, who has recorded a number for Yo-Yo Ma's hashtag Songs of Comfort, where musicians play from home to keep up the spirits of a world facing the virus. But first, Ranj Singh is a real medical doctor, but for the young viewers of the BBC TV channel CBeebies, he's the friendly face who explains to them what illnesses and injuries can do, and what they can expect if they have to visit hospital. He kindly agreed to join a call for World Versus Virus to take questions from three current and former viewers of the programme. If you want to know what children from 6 to 11 years of age would ask a doctor about coronavirus, keep listening. It was a lively Zoom call with many of the usual glitches. There he is. Hello. Hello, Dr Ranj. You're on mute, of course. You're on mute. But first, I asked Dr Ranj how parents should talk to their own children about COVID-19. It very much depends. So any parent that's out there, or parent or care that's out there that's worried about talking to their little ones, it very much depends on the age of your child. And you've got to tailor your information in your approach to how old your little one is and what their understanding is. So I guess one of the first ways to start is inform yourself. So get as much information for yourself from accurate and appropriate and reliable resources. So be careful where you go online. And then kind of gauge how much your child knows about it already and what their particular worries might be. You might be quite surprised. They may not be worried at all. Or they may be worried about something completely different to what you were expecting, wondering why they can't see their friends rather than what the virus is itself. So younger children will be a bit more concerned about how the world around them has changed, why their routine has changed, why they're unable to see certain members of family, potentially why they're unable to see friends, unable to go to school and do the normal things that they usually would do. And they might find if you turn explaining coronavirus into a bit of a game or a playful activity or an artistic activity, for example, drawing the virus and kind of understanding it from that perspective, they might find that really useful. Older children, as you get older and start moving into teenage, they will get more of an understanding of what's going on. Information may have come from social media and online, so they may already know quite a bit. And therefore, approaching their fears might be slightly different. It's important, whatever approach you take is to be honest and be as accurate as you can be. Try not to let your emotions come out too readily because children, if you're anxious, they will feed off your anxiety. They will reflect that back and that doesn't really help the situation. And if you don't know the answer, it's okay. Just say, I don't know, but let's go and find out. So let's see what it is that those children want to ask about COVID-19. You'll hear from Ella, Nine, Luke, Eleven, and first up, it's six-year-old Assel. Say hello, Assel. Hello. Hello. How do people catch coronavirus and how do you make them better? Okay. All right. So coronavirus is a type of virus, which are tiny little germs that you can't see with your eyes, but you can see them with really powerful microscopes. And if those germs get inside our bodies, they can make us unwell. And the way coronavirus spreads around, we think, is that if somebody is poorly with it, then if they cough and they sneeze and then the virus gets out of their body and then goes to other people, then it could make them poorly as well. Now, how do we make them feel better? Well, luckily, most people who get coronavirus are okay because their bodies have what's called an immune system and it fights the virus off and it makes them better and they can get better by themselves at home. Occasionally, people can get quite poorly with it and they may have to go to hospital to get better. Do we have to wash our food when we come back from the shops? Do we have to wash our food when we come back from the shops? I get asked this a lot, actually. So what we do know is that coronavirus can get onto surfaces like worktops or paper or wood or metal and it can sit on there and it can survive for a little bit of time. However, picking it up from something like shopping or mail or packaging is really not that common. So you're really unlikely to get coronavirus from your shopping or things like that. So you don't have to wash your shopping. You should still be washing fruit and vegetables that you buy in the supermarket anyway just in case they're dirty but you don't need to wash them because of coronavirus. If you do go shopping or if you do have some packaging or some mail that you've been handling with your hands then the best thing to do is put it away. You can throw the packaging away if you want and then wash your own hands afterwards. Can we go swimming in the summer? Can you go swimming in the summer? Well, we're waiting to find out when we will be allowed to do normal things like swimming again and it might be slightly different rules in different countries depending on what's going on in that particular country. So we're just waiting for the government to let us know when it's safe for us to do so. Thank you, Dr Rand. Thank you. Hello, Dr Rand. Hi. My name's Ella and I'm nine. I'd like to know how hard is it back in the coronavirus? Ooh, good question, Ella. So we know that most people who get coronavirus are going to be absolutely fine because their immune systems are really good at fighting it off, especially children. Children's immune systems are really, really good at fighting off coronavirus and they're the least likely to become really unwell from it. However, some people can become quite poorly and they might need to go to hospital and this is especially the case if you're very old or if you've got long-term medical problems and that's why it's really important for the rest of us all to protect those people as much as possible. Do we know how many people have caught it out of every 100? Ooh, that's a tricky one. So this very much varies according to where in the world you are, which country you live in as to how many people have got it. We don't actually know how many people have caught coronavirus but we do know that lots of people will have it and they will be okay looking after themselves at home. And if some people catch it and become unwell, then it's really important for them to stay indoors and be extra careful until they're well again so that they don't pass it on to anyone else. Have we seen anything like this before? Ooh, that's a good one. So coronavirus is what we call a pandemic and a pandemic is a scientific word that means that it's a condition that affects lots of people across lots of different countries around the world. And we actually have seen infections like this before that are also pandemics. For example, you might have heard of something called swine flu that happened not so long ago and then about a hundred years ago we had what was called the Spanish flu pandemic. So we have seen things like this before. Fortunately, we're in a better situation now because we've got better medicines and we've got better technology to help us fight it. We have also seen some other serious coronaviruses more recently. You might have heard of a condition called SARS or you might have heard of one called MERS. They're both coronaviruses. They happened more recently. They weren't pandemics because they stayed within sort of one region of the world and we managed to get control of those really, really quickly, which was good. How close is the scientists to finding a vaccine and will it be like the flu stuff at school? Ooh, lots of people have been asking that question and we've got lots and lots of scientists around the world that are working on a vaccine right now. It might end up being an injection or it might end up being a tablet or it could even be a nasal spray like the flu one that some schools have. The research is happening at the moment and until that's finished we won't know exactly what it's going to be or when it's going to come but it could take several months for that to happen. We're really hoping that we might have a vaccine before the end of the year and hopefully that will stop us, that will stop this happening all again in the future. Hello, Dr Anja Ayuk and I'm 11 years old. Hello, Luke. Where did the coronavirus come from? This is a fantastic question. So coronavirus is a type of virus. They're tiny little germs that we can't see with our eyes but they obviously can make us poorly. There are lots of different types of coronavirus and usually they just cause a mild cold but this one, this particular one called COVID-19 is a little bit more serious. Now some coronaviruses only affect humans. Some will only affect animals but very rarely one of the viruses changes or it mutates so that it can jump from animals to humans and we call this jumping species and we think that's what's happened here. We're not sure exactly which animal it came from but it might have started in bats or pangolins. We're not really sure which one and then jumped species to us. That doesn't mean it's any more severe. It just means that the virus changed so it could infect humans as well and now it's passed between humans. How long do you think the coronavirus will be around? We actually don't know but it's likely to be several months. Again this very much depends on where you live in the world. It could be slightly longer in some countries. It could be slightly less in others. We know from looking at other countries like China that you can control it and it does get less common but we don't know how long that's going to take and we don't know how long it's going to take to get rid of it completely. If we do get a vaccine then that should definitely help but in the meantime it's important for all of us to follow the rules stay at home and wash your hands and things like that. How old do you have to be to be known as vulnerable? Okay so the older you are the more risk you might be at if you do get coronavirus and by risk we mean that if you get coronavirus you could become much much more poorly from it. In the UK we say that anyone over the age of 70 should be extra careful to make sure they stay safe especially if they've got long-term medical problems and so for the rest of us that aren't over 70 it's really important that we follow the rules so we can help protect anybody else that might be at risk too. How long do you think that schools will be shut? Lots of kids have been asking this. The honest answer is that we don't know and it's going to be different for different countries again. Schools will only reopen once it's safe to do so and we're waiting for the government to tell us when that's going to be but there are lots of things that you can do at home in the meantime and I'm sure that your school has probably sent home work or been recommending stuff for you to do at home as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you to Assel, to Ella and to Luke and to Dr. Ranj Singh. Thanks for taking the time to answer children's questions for us. Thank you everyone. And Robin Pomeroy. And Robin Pomeroy. Everyone else. Thanks so much. You can get more help on talking to children about COVID-19 on Dr. Ranj's podcast, A Kids Guide to Coronavirus and for some light relief for parents or any grown-ups check out Steth's Drugs and Rock and Roll which he records with two other doctors. I'm joined now by my colleague Linda Lucina in New York. Hi Linda. Hi Robin, how are you? Not bad. Thank you. How are you? Great. Good. Now Linda always picks us three really good stories from our website weforum.org. What have you picked for us this week? I have picked three stories that sort of surprised me. Things that highlighted things that either charmed me or heartened me but mostly that surprised me. The first one involves managing risk. A mathematician from MIT looked at different risk models for getting back to daily life. She's not a public health expert but she's in quarantine cooped up like the rest of us and she just spent that time running some numbers. I love that. And she gives us a fresh look at the impact of social distancing and hand washing. Her breakdowns give us a new look at the importance of keeping that six feet of distance and they can help us be a little bit more comfortable navigating the sidewalk and managing risks as we get back to that new normal. This is the one COVID-19 lockdowns are lifting. How safe is it to go out? That's a question a lot of people are asking. What's your second story? In my second story, a historian wrote about a 17th century shipment who lived through the bubonic plague and it's interesting because back then there were no tracing apps, there were no trackers and you only knew how far the virus had spread by seeing a red cross in your neighbor's door or seeing a list of burials in the paper. A lot has changed and I just find it heartening to know how we faced such things before and also just to know how lucky we are. Okay, heartening or terrifying, depending on how you respond to it, this one's called Samuel Pieps's Diary shows parallels between life during the bubonic plague and coronavirus. Yeah, that one, it reminded me a little bit last week if any listeners have not heard it yet. We had an interview with a historian about the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918. So there's lots of these historic parallels coming up, this one obviously going much further back in time. What's your third story, Linda? A non-profit CEO wrote a piece for us with some really eye-opening statistics about food waste, including the fact that 30% of food waste occurs before consumers are even involved and hunger is a massive global issue and it's one that existed long before the pandemic came about and so it's just a great reminder of some of the imbalances that we can start to get to fixing once things kind of lock back. It's one of those things that coronavirus is bringing to the fore about global inequality. The story is called The Pandemic is just another sign of our broken food system and that and the other stories and many other interesting stories about coronavirus are online at our website at weforum.org. Linda, thanks very much. Alright, thanks so much, Robin. Reeps One and this is Songs for Comfort. In response to the global pandemic, Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist who's a trustee of the World Economic Forum invited acclaimed musicians around the world to record music from their own homes and post the performances online with the hashtag Songs of Comfort. One of them is Harry Yeff, aka vocal artist Reeps One. In this video, Reeps One starts by singing at his piano with his cat paying close attention. The song then bursts into extraordinary percussive vocal stylings. You can see the video on our Twitter feed at WF and find others by searching for hashtag Songs of Comfort. Thanks for listening to World Versus Virus. You can find all our coverage of COVID-19 at weforum.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and on Twitter. Please subscribe to receive the podcast every week. Just search World Versus Virus on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. My thanks to Gareth Nolan, Kate Whiting for helping producing this week's episode. And we'll play out with the full performance Reeps One's Song of Comfort.