Consider This from NPR - Federal Stay-At-Home Guidance Ends; A Potential New Test For COVID-19

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

The federal stay-at-home guidance ends on Thursday. Some governors are planning to open up their states, but others say it's too soon. A potential new kind of test for COVID-19 could be simpler and cheaper to use than existing tests. But because it has a relatively high false negative rate, some scientists are wary. The pandemic has left more than 30 million people in the U.S. unemployed. Activists and community organizers are putting together strikes, refusing to pay rent on May 1. But landlords are also facing financial pressure.Using the Defense Production Act, President Trump has ordered meatpacking plants to stay open despite a high rate of coronavirus outbreaks among workers. KCUR's Frank Morris reports on what's happening in the industry.Life Kit's guide to managing screen time on Apple, Spotify and NPR One.Find and support your local public radio stationSign up for 'The New Normal' newsletterThis 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

The federal guidance to stay at home ends tonight. And across the country, governors are making plans for what to do next. Some, like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, are planning to open up. My executive order to stay at home is set to expire on April the 30th. That executive order has done its job to slow the growth of COVID-19, and I will let it expire as scheduled. Other governors say it's too soon, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has announced that he will be closing beaches and state parks.

Specific issues on some of those beaches have raised alarm bells. Coming up, millions of people are unemployed and the rent is due on Friday. And the latest on the meatpacking industry. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Thursday, April 30th. Okay, so it is no secret that a lack of testing has made it hard to contain the coronavirus in the United States. Beyond the supply shortages, tests are expensive and they take time.

That's why a new approach to testing could be promising. We have to have a breakthrough innovation in testing. We have to be able to detect antigen rather than constantly trying to detect the actual live virus or the viral particles itself, and to really move into antigen testing. That's Dr. Deborah Birx on NBC's Meet the Press. She's talking about antigen testing, something that scientists say they are close to developing. These tests would be a breakthrough, Birx says, because they're fast and cheap to make, and anyone could use them at home.

It looks very much like a pregnancy test. They're very simple. They can give you a readout within about 15 minutes or so. And so it could be a very good way of solving the testing problem that we're having in the U.S. right now. That's Lee Gerke. He's a scientist at MIT and Harvard involved with one of the companies working on developing these antigen tests. But here's the problem. These tests aren't always accurate. They're already used to test for the flu and strep. And even with those, they miss around 15 or 20 out of every 100 infected people.

Jesse Pappenberg, an infectious disease expert at McGill University, says that's why we might not want to rely on them to make big decisions. If you're using this test to screen people to make sure that they're not infected and then they can, you know, go back to work and things like that, then you'd be giving people the message that they're not infected when actually they are, and therefore transmitting. What's next is more research and standards for how to use an antigen test. We've got a link to NPR health correspondent Rob Stein's full reporting on this in our episode notes. The rent is due tomorrow, and with today's news that another 3.8 million people have filed for unemployment,

bringing the total to more than 30 million people since the pandemic hit, there's no doubt that a lot of people will have trouble paying the rent. NPR's Jim Zeroli reports on calls for a rent strike. When the coronavirus hit, a Brooklyn woman named Donette lost her business cleaning houses. Donette, who doesn't want her last name used because she's undocumented, has a bit of savings, but she says it won't last long. So she's planning on joining a citywide rent strike tomorrow. Am I going to use my savings to pay rent when I have a 14-year-old daughter who might not know what it feels like to go to bed

hungry. Nationwide, nearly a third of renters didn't pay their April rent on time, and those numbers are likely to go up again in May and June. In New York, there's not a lot landlords can do about it right now. Governor Andrew Cuomo has called for a three-month moratorium on evictions. And that to me is the fundamental answer. If you pay the security deposit, you don't pay the security deposit, you pay part of the rent, none of the rent, you can't be evicted for three months, period. The moratorium may be more symbolic than anything else. Housing courts are closed until late June, so no one's getting evicted anyway. Meanwhile, some officials are arguing

that the state needs to do more, even if it means forcing landlords to suspend rent payments for a few months. Michael Gennaris, a state senator from Queens, spoke on WNYC last week. He says the government has barred people from going to work, so they shouldn't have to worry about paying rent. We pulled people's ability to have income from them, and yet they continue to have financial obligations accruing. The biggest one for most people is the rent payment. Some housing activists want to go further with tomorrow's call for a citywide rent strike. Sia Weaver is coordinating the effort. If you can't pay in May, join us. Let's not pay together. And it's not just happening in New York, she says.

This is happening really across the country. It's from Kansas City to Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. This is not just like a coastal problem. This is very much happening in every part of the country. It's not clear how much support there is for a rent strike. Jay Martin heads an industry group called the Community Housing Improvement Program. He says a rent strike could force some small landlords into bankruptcy. It's in no one's best interest if banks become the largest landlords of New York City. With or without a rent strike, Martin says, landlords are going to be facing real financial pressures over the next few months. He says there's been a big drop off in applications for new apartments. More and more people are losing their jobs and an even bigger number than normal are going to have trouble paying their rent.

And PR's Jim Zeroli. People working at meatpacking plants are getting coronavirus at high rates. Some plants have closed, which means meat production is down. So this week, the administration stepped in using the Defense Production Act, which President Trump has been hesitant to use for testing supplies and protective gear, he ordered meatpacking plants to stay open. And he said he would protect companies from getting sued. We did a great thing last night using the powers that we have to make sure that the processes and all of the delivery of our food chain, that it was protected and safe. Some workers are pretty unhappy about being forced to go to work. In Nebraska, 2,000 workers walked off the job.

And many people say the meat supply isn't in serious danger anyway. The U.S. produced so much pork last year, it was able to export 30 percent. This all means the future is unclear for this industry, as Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports. Minnesota hog farmer Mike Patterson is in a tight spot. We just physically can't house all those animals. There's just no place for them to go. His barns are chock full full and modern production agriculture is precise. Imagine a conveyor belt and on Patterson's farm about 330 full-grown pigs need to get off the end of that belt each week to make room for 330 more coming in the pipeline. Problem is the COVID-19 outbreak closed the packing house that normally buys Patterson's animals more than two weeks ago.

Essentially, we're just running out of space and running out of time. And at the end, you know, disposing of the animals through a depopulation is the final and only choice we really have. Disposing of healthy animals is now a daily fact of life on hog farms in the upper Midwest. This is really a crisis with of life on hog farms in the upper Midwest. This is really a crisis with lots of hard decisions they have to make. David Anderson, a livestock economist at Texas A&M, says the pork industry is hardest hit, with nearly 40% of the nation's pork processing capability now offline on any given day. That's driving up consumer prices for some cuts of meat and setting up the possibility of shortages to come. But while many big packing houses are hobbled by COVID-19 outbreaks,

some small ones are thriving. This is our blast chiller. So when the meat comes out of the smoke house, it comes into here. Here at Kurzweil's Meats in Garden City, Missouri, Chris Kurzweil wears a white coat and hairnet, but no mask. Coronavirus infections are low in this mostly rural county, and business here is brisk. It's been very good. We are just busy as can be right now. For one thing, his small workforce is healthy, and Kurzweil says his company was quick to pivot away from restaurant supply to grocery store sales. We were able to change and turn and make smaller packages, one pound packages, to go to the end consumer. And we were able to do that quick, where a lot of these big companies, they can't do that. Around the country, small butchers are buying some of the animals that

farmers would otherwise be selling to big meat companies. But it is far from a complete solution. I'd maybe more describe it as a pressure relief valve. That's Mike Patterson again, and he is under pressure. He's managed to sell, or give, about 170 of his hogs to local processors and a food pantry. While that beats euthanizing them, it won't pay his bills. And Patterson figures he'll lose close to half a million dollars if he can't sell his excess hogs,

animals that the pandemic disruption has left at least temporarily worthless. KCUR's Frank Morris. As we maintain social distance from other humans, a lot of us are getting socially closer to our screens. All of our new daily routines seem to involve phones, laptops, TVs, things like Zoom, happy hours, FaceTime playdates, virtual workouts. And while it's nice to maintain connections, burnout is also very real. We're not just heads sitting on bodies. We have a whole body that needs to be taken care of as well. And it's important to take breaks from our screens once in a while. That's Katherine Price, author of How to Break Up with Your Phone.

Don't worry, she's not saying screens are all bad all the time. Instead, she says we should think about screen time in terms of quality, not quantity. And she has a few suggestions. For example, if you're having issues with compulsively checking your phone before bed, maybe get your phone out of your bedroom. Put a book on the bedside table instead. If you're doing too many Zoom calls, just say no sometimes to those invitations. It's especially important during this time to consider giving ourselves breaks because it's easy to burn out on connection even when it's good. For more ideas on how to find the right type and amount of screen time for you, check out LifeKit's guide to managing screen time in our episode notes.

And for more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station. And for podcasts, local news, and the latest headlines, take NPR Everywhere with the NPR One app. You can find it in your app store. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening to the show. We will be back with more tomorrow.