Consider This from NPR - Fauci Fact-Checks Trump On Testing

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Wearing a face mask, with hand sanitizer and Lysol wipes close at hand, Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the House Tuesday, to explain why the U.S. still struggles to get a handle on the coronavirus. On Saturday, the U.S. reported 32,411 new cases in just that one day. Fauci also countered President Trump's claim that more testing is "a double-edged sword" to blame for the rise in coronavirus cases across the country. Instead, Fauci says testing is essential if we want to get control of the virus. And NPR's Lauren Frayer takes us to India, where the health care system is collapsing under the heavy demand caused by COVID-19. Plus — for the past three months, just about everyone who can work from home has. And for the most part, things seem to be working. So, as NPR's Uri Berliner reports, more and more employers are looking to make the move permanent. Sign up for 'The New Normal' newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station. This episode was recorded and published as part of this podcast's former 'Coronavirus Daily' format.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, just a quick thing before we get started. We want you to know that pretty soon we are going to change the name of this show from Coronavirus Daily to Consider This. And we're going to start to bring you stories that are not just about the pandemic. But that does not mean we're going to stop covering the news about the virus. It is still here, and so are we. For now, we would love to hear from you. Our email is still coronavirusdaily at npr.org. OK, here's the show. On the White House lawn Tuesday, President Trump was asked by a CBS News reporter about something he said at his rally in Tulsa over the weekend. What he said was he'd actually told his staff to slow down testing to keep the number of positive cases down.

And so the reporter asked if he was kidding when he said that. I don't kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear. But then. I as a member of the task force and my colleagues on the task force, to my knowledge. Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Tuesday there was no slowing down. To my knowledge, none of us have ever been told to slow down on testing. That just is a fact. The president has called increased testing a double-edged sword that leads to a spike in the number of cases. At the same time, nearly all public health experts agree this country needs more testing, not less.

Coming up, more from Dr. Fauci and how the health care system in India is collapsing. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Tuesday, June 23rd. Wearing a face mask with hand sanitizer and Lysol wipes on the table next to him, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down to testify at the House on Tuesday. Today, the committee is holding a hearing entitled Oversight of the.S. response to the pandemic were asked by the committee's Democrats about how the U.S. ended up here. We have a very large country, very heterogeneous, major differences, for example, between the New York metropolitan area and Casper, Wyoming. If you look at how we've been hit, we've been hit badly. Now that more than 120,000 people have died in the U.S., and with nearly 2.5 million confirmed cases so far,

the highest numbers in the world, anyone can see, Fauci said, that this country is struggling. But... In some respects, we've done very well. For example, the New York metro area. Cases there did go down dramatically with social distancing. And New York City is now carefully taking steps to reopen. However, in other areas of the country, we're now seeing a disturbing surge of infections

that looks like it's a combination. But one of the things is an increase in community spread. That increase happens when places reopen and people come in more contact with each other. Barbershops, restaurants, parties, and barbecues. But when there's not enough testing and there are conflicting messages about masking and other precautions. Now, some cities and states are pausing their plans to reopen. Others are even closing places that just reopened. Right now, the next couple of weeks are going to be critical in our ability to address those surgings that we're seeing in Florida, in Texas, in Arizona,

and in other states. They're not the only ones that are having a difficulty. Bottom line, Mr. Chairman, it's a mixed bag. Some good and some now we have a problem with. Since all of this started, just about everyone who can work from home is working from home. And now, three months into this huge unplanned social experiment, working from home seems to be going okay. It's not just big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook that are saying employees will be able to work from home even after the pandemic. Ohio-based Nationwide Insurance is shutting down five regional offices. The company's CEO, Kurt Walker, says the employees' response to that decision has been... Overwhelming. Hundreds of emails and cards and letters and phone calls.

Thank you for doing this. So I think we got it right. Right for the employees and right for the company's finances. As a private company, we've elected not to share what the savings are, but they're significant. NPR's Uri Berliner takes it from here. Saving money, it's always an attractive proposition for businesses, especially these days, and that's likely to drive the shift to remote work. Kate Lister consults with companies on the future of work at Global Workplace Analytics. Going into a recession and economic downturn,

those CEOs are laying awake at night thinking of all those buildings that they're heating. Productivity is continuing without being at the office and saying, wow, I think we could use for a change here. Companies including investment banks Morgan Stanley and Barclays and food giant Mondelez all expect to use less real estate as more employees work from home. But remote work all the time isn't popular with either bosses or workers. Workplace consultant Lister has done a survey showing that the sweet spot for employees is splitting the work week between home and office. And that would suit Matthew Schultz just fine. If I were to have it my way, I would probably work from home three days a week and go into the office too. Schultz is a plumbing designer who lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Normally, he drives an hour each day to get to an office in Dallas. But these days, he pads over to a guest bedroom at home and fires up his computer. You know, I'm sitting here wearing shorts and a t-shirt and I've got, you know, my two cats just running around all through the house. It's kind of weird, but at the same time, it's more comfortable and I feel like I'm a lot more relaxed here than I am in the office. Schultz says he gets at least as much done from home as in the office. And that tracks Lister's survey showing 77% of workers say they're fully productive at home and managers are largely satisfied with their work performance. Now the caveats. More than half of working Americans can't do their jobs remotely

at all. And before we get giddy thinking that work from home is a cure-all, it's worth listening to Judy Olson. I've been studying distance work for about 30 years now. Olson is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. She says there are significant downsides to remote work. Collaboration with colleagues often suffers. You can feel lonely and isolated. The hardest thing for somebody to deal with long distance is silence. And it's easy to feel like you've disappeared from the action, the casual chats, and the important decisions.

Basically blind and invisible. So you have to take all kinds of extra effort to make sure that you coordinate well with the people that you're working with. Oh, and one other thing. Olson says it's important to have a good chair if you're working from home. You don't want to throw out your back. That was NPR's Uri Berliner. At first, India avoided the worst of the coronavirus outbreak. Then it started reopening. Now it is seeing record numbers of new cases almost every day. And while the relative numbers of cases and deaths are worse here in the U.S., India doesn't have the same resources this country has. And its already struggling health

care system is collapsing. NPR's Lauren Frayer has the story from Mumbai. As India's lockdown eased, Kanishk Dutt's family started going out and his grandfather started coughing. He's 77 and has a heart condition. He was having breathing problems and that's when we realized and decided to take him to a nearby hospital, which actually refused to take the patient. The hospital turned them away because his grandfather had not had a COVID-19 test, and they couldn't administer one there. So they went to another hospital, but it was full.

Finally, they went to a private clinic, which tested him for about $60. Most Indians would not be able to afford that. Dutt's grandfather was positive, but the clinic didn't have a bed for him, so Dutt is taking care of him at home. India's free public hospitals are overflowing. Private ones are charging up to $1,000 a day for intensive care, and many of them are even full. Even the rich and famous now find themselves in the same boat as everyone else. Please, please, I really need your help. A soap opera star posted a video on Instagram begging for a hospital bed for her mother. Social media is full of desperate pleas like this.

Some Indians are dying in parking lots and on sidewalks outside clinics. And if they do manage to get inside, well, this video shows corpses in body bags lined up right alongside the beds of live patients on oxygen at a public hospital in Mumbai. Dr. Sonali Vaid runs a COVID-19 helpline in Delhi. She's also a public health expert, and she says India's health system was already near collapse even before the virus hit. Having two patients on a bed and one on a floor is not an uncommon sight, even in pre-COVID times. We already had broken slippers and now we're trying to run a marathon with broken slippers. The government called an early strict lockdown which helped slow the spread of the virus.

But it was forced to lift the lockdown amid mass unemployment and even starvation. And now the virus is surging. Dr. Ritu Priya, another public health expert, says India should have used that time to better prepare by possibly even nationalizing private hospitals. Because 80% of our doctors are in the private sector. There has to be some kind of structure by which they come under command of the public system. But this far into the pandemic, both public and private hospitals in India's biggest cities are now overloaded. It means that even non-COVID patients struggle to get care.

Pramila Minns describes how her 55-year-old mother recently suffered a stroke at her home in Delhi. Minns works as a housemate. Her family is poor. So Minns rushed her mother to a government hospital. And then to five more. Minns says she and her sister ferried their ailing mother around in taxis and rickshaws for 12 hours in 90-degree heat. Finally, Minns' employer managed to call in a favor to a local politician. Her mother is now in intensive care. NPR's Lauren Frayer. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station and on NPR.org.

Additional reporting in this episode was from Laurel Wamsley. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening. We will be back with more tomorrow. Actress Tracee Ellis Ross is used to people talking about her age a lot. And she's okay with whatever people say. I'm 47 years old and I'm the most comfortable in my skin I've ever been. When we go back to being 22, no thank you. The Black-ish star on Confronting an Ageist World. Listen and subscribe to It's Been a Minute from NPR.