Transcript of Who can catch COVID-19?
A conversation between Ella Darling from the Council for Intellectual Disability and Dr Jan Fizzell who is Senior Medical Advisor at NSW Health.
Ella: Hi my name is Ella I work for the Council for Intellectual Disability. We will be talking about COVID-19 with Dr Jan.
Dr Jan: Hi I'm Dr Jan Fizzell, and I am a Senior Medical Advisor in the NSW Health COVID-19 Response team and I'm here to answer some questions from Ella.
Ella: The first question I want to ask is, can you catch COVID-19?
Dr Jan: I think all of us could catch COVID-19 and that's simply because it's a virus which is a type of germ that is quite easy for us as humans to catch. It comes in little drops of spit and the little drops of spit are either things that when we talk to each other, when we are too close together, my spit can get up your nose, not nice. Or if we are talking really loudly or singing really loudly we can push those drops of spits even further away. Which is why people when they are singing we are saying keep further apart.
Any of us can catch COVID-19, I don't think there is any group of humans who have been shown to have natural immunity to it, so that's why we all have got to be careful.
Ella: How can I avoid catching COVID-19?
Dr Jan: So the key things are keeping apart from other people and I know that's really hard. I find that really difficult when I am with family and friends to keep that physical distance. But trying to remind myself to keep that apart (gestures with hands).
I can wear a mask when I'm around my family and friends and that would mean that if I have COVID-19 even if I have it breathing out with my spit the mask is catching it before it gets to my friends and family. So if I was worried I could ask friends and family to please wear a mask to help protect me.
And the other thing is keeping our hands clean, because if we touch a surface and it has virus on it and then touch our face, we have a problem. So if we clean our hands, it doesn't matter how grubby the surface is, we can't put it onto our face.