“There’s lots of children who talked to us through our online platforms saying, ‘I am really scared. I know it’s serious because Mum and Dad aren’t talking about it'.
Kids ask the darndest things in the middle of a pandemic. Such as: can they catch COVID-19 from their friend’s pencil and who ate the bat and why do grown-ups have to wear masks but they don’t?
But casting around for something to bring the virus to life, Dr Dickinson realised Slime Bug’s “sticky out bits” replicated COVID-19’s “dangly bits”, which Nanogirl explains in the video “stick to our lungs” and make it hard to breathe. “I said to the Prime Minister, ‘Look, I think we need to have conversations with children because they are scared’ … so we decided very quickly we were going to run a press conference just for children.”
“We socially distanced children who came in and got to ask real questions about rumours they had heard in the playground or things they had heard Mum and Dad say and they wanted to know from a real scientist ‘Was this true?’ ” Dr Dickinson says. The questions, which Dr Dickinson describes as “utterly delightful”, range from existential to practical to whimsical.
Dr Dickinson says there is no evidence eating a bat is how humans got the virus. As for bats, they tend to host a lot of viruses that don’t make them sick: “So I think the bats are going to be OK.”
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