Science Rules! with Bill Nye · Stitcher & Bill Nye

Coronavirus: America’s King of Health Is Skipping Christmas … and So Should You

·37 min·3 clips

Dr. Francis Collins reveals why your mask is not just a face covering but a life-saving medical device that could prevent you from killing others.

Science Rules is Bill Nye's science podcast. This special Coronavirus Edition features Dr. Francis Collins, physician and geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and served as Director of the National Institutes of Health. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. The episode is recorded as the US approaches what the hosts describe as a very difficult period: roughly 200,000 daily positive tests, 1,000-2,000 daily deaths, and a likely death toll exceeding 300,000 by year's end. The US is experiencing what Collins calls the extreme result of COVID fatigue, colder weather, and the desire to gather for the holidays. Collins says it is too early to fully measure the post-Thanksgiving surge, but that cases in coastal states and the Sunbelt are rising so fast that any additional bounce would be hard to detect in the steep upward curve. He notes that states in the upper Midwest — the Dakotas, Montana, Utah — which were in a terrible position a few weeks earlier have shown some plateau, possibly from mitigation measures that were eventually implemented. This points to what he finds most frustrating: the pattern of waiting until disaster is already present before implementing measures that are known to work. Collins makes an emphatic restatement that a mask is not a political symbol or a mere social gesture but a life-saving medical device, demonstrating by speaking through his own mask clearly during the interview. The episode is characterised by Collins's combination of scientific precision and evident frustration at the gap between what the science says and how it was being implemented.

As heard by us

A calm, question-led look at COVID testing delays, the surge, and what vaccines could still change.

Bill Nye uses a holiday-time COVID conversation to press the blunt questions the moment demanded: why testing took so long, why the pandemic had run out of control, and what vaccines could realistically change.

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If holiday plans and COVID headlines are colliding, press play.

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