Kids and COVID-19, Photo Ark, Medicinal Leeches

What We Know – And What We Still Don’t – About Kids and COVID-19 (0:31) Guest: Damian Roland, Pediatric Emergency Physician, Honorary Associate Professor at University of Leicester, Contributor to dontforgetthebubbles.com What do we know at this point about how COVID-19 affects kids? The vast majority of serious cases worldwide have been adults, though maybe you’ve heard the reports of a mysterious illness doctors are seeing in children that maybe be linked to the coronavirus.  Photographer’s Intimate Portraits of 10,000 Species and Counting (17:16) Guest: Joel Sartore, Creator of the Photo Ark, National Geographic Photographer. Many of the most threatened creatures on the planet – those on a path to extinction – are found only in the care of humans. They’re in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries and number about 15,000 species in all. National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore is on a mission to photograph every single one of them portrait-style. He’s just hit 10,000. That’s a lot of photoshoots with wild animals and insects. How do you even make a grasshopper or a frog or a bison stand still for a closeup? Will We Have Standardized Tests After COVID-19? (33:28) Guest: Jayne Caflin Fonash, President of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The pandemic has cheated the Class of 2020 out of their high school graduation ceremony, but the Class of 2021 is getting a little pandemic bonus: many schools – including Harvard, Cornell and all California state universities - are waiving the requirement that next year’s applicants have to take the SAT or ACT. Even before the pandemic, more than a thousand colleges had made the standardized tests optional for applicants. And now the largest membership organizations of college admissions professionals in the country says this is a good time to reassess whether the ACT and SAT still make sense. Leeches Are Still Used in Modern Hospitals (50:41) Guest: Jeffery Janis, Reconstructive Surgeon at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.  Imagine you’ve just had reconstructive surgery to reattach a finger or graft some skin onto a badly burned part of your body, and in comes a nurse with a medical device to help your wound heal. You look at the tray and it’s a vial of greenish, black leeches. That’s right, blood-sucking worms are officially-sanctioned for medical treatment by the Food and Drug Administration. How South Korea Stopped COVID-19 (1:08:41) Guest: Scott Snyder, Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on US-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States and South Korea both had their first case of COVID-19 the week of January 20th. But the two countries took very different approaches to the pandemic, leading to a much, much higher infection and death rate from COVID-19 in the United States. What did South Korea do differently? COVID19 Is Heavily Affecting Native Communities (1:26:54) Guest: Thomas J. Kim, Internal Medicine Physician and Medical Director for the California Rural Indian Health Board; Vanesscia Cresci, Director of Research and Public Health, California Rural Indian Health Board. The Navajo Nation now has the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rate in the country – even more than New York and New Jersey. More than 4,000 members of the Navajo Nation have tested positive for COVID-19 and 160 have died. California’s tribal communities, by contrast, have fared far better, with just 85 confirmed cases of COVID-19.