Consider This from NPR - 3 Million Cases And Counting, U.S. Faces Same Problems From Beginning Of Pandemic

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

The U.S. Supreme Court has made it more difficult for women to get access to birth control. The opinion upheld a Trump administration rule that allows employers to use religious or moral reasons to deny birth control coverage. The United States has more than 3 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus and is still facing the same problems from the early days of the pandemic, including a lack of PPE, slow testing and not enough contact tracing.Doctors are using a new antigen test that is a faster way to spot people infected with the coronavirus. NPR's Rob Stein reports it's cheaper and simpler but may be less reliable. Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, before we get to the show, we want to ask you a quick favor. We want to know what you like about this show and what you think we could do better. So if you have about 10 minutes, help us out by taking a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash consider this survey. We'd really appreciate it. Again, it's npr.org slash consider this survey. Okay, here's the show. Today, the Supreme Court made it harder for women to get access to birth control. Until now, under the Affordable Care Act, nearly all employers that provided insurance plans had to include birth control coverage without a copay.

Today's ruling was a win for the Trump administration. Now, more employers can refuse to cover free birth control for religious or moral reasons. I fully respect employers' religious or moral objections to contraception. Kathleen Sebelius was Health and Human Services Secretary for the Obama administration when the law was first put in place. But barring their employees from a benefit that they should be entitled to, barring their employee spouses and their employees' dependent daughters from being

in a situation that they can access this benefit, I find to be quite troubling. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, by the government's own count, up to 126,000 women will immediately lose access to no-cost contraceptive services. Coming up, the United States now has 3 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus. A lot of those cases are in places that didn't have them before, but in so many ways, the challenges of this pandemic are the same as they were back at the beginning. This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Wednesday, July 8th. Staying home for weeks and weeks and weeks this spring was supposed to be about buying time.

That time was supposed to make us more prepared to fight the virus. Doctors have made progress in how they treat patients with COVID-19, as Dr. Anthony Fauci said they would. But the big systemic challenges that were there three months ago are pretty much still true today. And we've made a lot of progress. Our strategy is moving along well. The president just over the weekend was still downplaying rising cases. Ninety nine percent of which are totally harmless. Leaving local and state leaders to manage the response, or not. We're soon going to get to the point where everybody in the United States knows someone personally who's very sick with COVID-19. That is going to have an incredibly destabilizing effect on the country. That's Dr. Peter Hotez. He's an infectious

disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine. He told CNN this week that in many places, especially in the South, we've gotten to the point that there are too many cases to do the thing we were supposed to be able to do by now, contact tracing. We cannot even do contact tracing anymore. I don't think, I don't see how it's possible to even do that. So essentially, even our limited means of public health control are not possible. So this is this dramatic acceleration. The epidemic is out of control. Contact tracing was supposed to be the way to control the virus and reopen safely.

PPE supplies were supposed to catch up with demand. Health care workers believe we could see another shortage of personal protective equipment. ICU beds were supposed to be more available. In what feels like a flashback to the early days of the pandemic, intensive care units in more than 50 Florida hospitals are now full. And then there's testing. Testing was supposed to become widely available wherever it was needed. Right now, it's at about half of what it needs to be. This weekend, I was at a testing location where people were waiting in 110 degrees

for hours and hours, eight hours in their car, running out of gasoline, desperate to get a test. Mayor of Phoenix Kate Gallego told NPR this week the city needs help with testing from the federal government, that they don't have enough public health workers to do it. As a mayor, there's no one else to pass the buck to, So that's why we've challenged our librarians, parks workers and public works employees to step up and help with testing. But in the United States of America, I have to think that there should be more resources and we shouldn't have to yet again depend on our librarians. So let's stick with testing for a few minutes.

It was always going to be hard for the U.S. to have enough diagnostic tests to figure out who is positive and who isn't at any given time. It would take about one million new tests every day for the country to just control the outbreak. Tens of millions each week to get everybody back to work. But there was also hope that faster and cheaper tests would come along. NPR's Rob Stein reports on one of those new tests that looks promising but not perfect. He starts with a worker safety officer in Texas. The minute Gary Burke found out he might have been exposed to the coronavirus, he knew he had to get tested right

away. Burke's in charge of worker safety at a big construction site in Texas, so he understood what would happen if he was infected. I have 274 people working out here. And so if that were the case, that I did come up positive, that would have meant we would have had to shut the project down and everybody go get tested to find out who's positive, who's negative. We were all sweating bullets. So Burke rushed to the nearest clinic where he could find out immediately if he had caught the virus.

It came back negative. Oh, man, I was elated. There's huge things at stake. Burke was able to go right back to work, and the new federal courthouse he was building could stay on track. It was huge. You have no idea. You know, there's a lot of money involved and it just, you know, I don't want to be the guy that spreads anything like that. The kind of test Burke got is a new kind of test. It's called an antigen test because it looks for a piece of the virus called an antigen in specimens collected by swabbing inside the nose. It works like those quick strep and flu tests everyone's been getting

for years at their doctor's offices and neighborhood clinics. So some think it's the kind of test that the nation needs to safely reopen by quickly and easily testing millions of teachers, students, factory workers, waiters, over and over again. If you're going to do tens of millions of tests a week, we're going to need these tests. Douglas Bryant is president and CEO of Coidel Corporation, which makes the tests. His company can crank out millions of the tests. It only costs about $20 compared to $100 for the much more complicated genetic tests that have been used so far.

And it produces results within 15 minutes, right on the spot, instead of waiting hours or even days. It's the cost. It's the speed. It's actually just the capacity to do the tests. The Trump administration is banking on antigen tests to help finally solve the shortage of testing that has hobbled the nation's ability to stop the relentless spread of the virus. But some experts say antigen tests just aren't as reliable. They tend to miss about 20% of infections. Frederick Nolte is a testing expert at the Medical University of South Carolina. The danger is that you will miss actively infected patients. And if you miss them, they will go on to spread the disease to others. And that could help let the virus spiral out of control

again and again and again. It has tremendous ramifications in terms of the controlling of the spread of the pandemic. But Quydell's Bryant says his test is much more reliable than most antigen tests, and the ability to do regular mass testing cheaply, easily, and quickly would outweigh any shortcomings of these new antigen tests.

NPR's Rob Stein. Just a quick thing now about the number of people dying from COVID-19. This week, the president and his allies have pointed out that the fatality rate is down in the U.S. compared to the beginning of the pandemic. That is true. We have not yet seen deaths go up in the same way that cases have across the country. But it's not as simple as the president is making it out to be. It's a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday, yes, doctors have learned more about how to treat the virus. And it's also true that a larger share of the cases today are among younger and healthier people. But here's the thing about the data we're seeing today. The number of people dying is what experts call a lagging indicator, meaning this number doesn't start rising until weeks after new cases are recorded. And just recently, the number of people dying in Texas and Arizona hit all-time highs. Plus, Fauci said, getting this virus is still really bad. Even though the incidence is less of serious complications, we are now getting multiple examples of young people who are getting

sick, getting hospitalized, and some of them even requiring intensive care. There's so many other things that are very dangerous and bad about this virus. Don't get yourself into false complacency. That's the show for today. Reporting in this episode from NPR's Sarah McCammon and from our colleagues at All Things Considered. You can write to us at considerthisatnpr.org. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with more tomorrow. Whenever you face a choice, it helps to think like an economist. And this week on Planet Money Summer School, we'll start off our course in economics with a workout for your brain, how to decide what something truly costs. Listen now to Planet Money from NPR.