Consider This from NPR - Florida Passes 100,000 Cases; More Young People Are Testing Positive

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Florida passed a grim milestone: 100,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases. The latest numbers include a lot of people in their 20s and 30s. Some officials are putting a pause on reopening. The Trump administration has started shipping out supplies needed to ensure sufficient testing. But those supplies haven't always been very helpful and in some cases they've been hazardous. NPR's Rob Stein has the details. Iowa is home to some 10,000 refugees from Myanmar. The coronavirus has been especially hard on them, with estimates saying as many as 70% have contracted the virus. As Iowa Public Radio's Kate Payne reports, many in the Burmese community work at local meatpacking plants, where social distancing is a constant challenge.Preparing to visit family in long-term care facilities? NPR's Allison Aubrey has some tips to keep everyone safe. 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

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Hey, as we've been saying, pretty soon we are going to change the name of the show to Consider This and start to bring you stories that are not just about the coronavirus. And we're doing that because we know that people are consuming less news about the pandemic. Still, just want to be clear, it doesn't mean we're going to stop covering the virus. We won't. The virus is still here and so are we. For now, our email is still coronavirusdaily at npr.org, and we would love to hear from you. Okay, here's the show. Florida hit a grim number today. With nearly 5,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases just on Saturday, the state now has more than 100,000 cases overall.

And that number is growing fast. So the mayor of Miami now says the city will not move into the next phase of reopening. We are not going into phase three. And phase three means we're not having, we're not opening nightclubs. We're not opening large venues where you could have any sort of large congregational people. That's Mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican on CNN. He admits the new surge in cases was in part because Florida reopened restaurants. And he says a lot of the new cases are young people who could be putting older relatives in danger.

The fact of the matter is our percentage positives or the percentage of people that test that become positive has gone up dramatically. Last week it was hovering around 8%. This week, based on the data that I've just been given, it's at 14%, so it's almost double. Florida Senator Rick Scott, also a Republican, said on CNBC that this is not over yet. Every one of us, everybody's got to take this seriously. Wear your mask, social distance, you know, don't go places you don't have to go to.

Be careful. I mean, this is, it's pretty basic. This is, it's still deadly. Let's, you know, we all have to be careful. By the way, Florida is not the only state where cases are going up. Almost two dozen others are seeing that too. Coming up, how the virus is spreading among refugees from Myanmar and meatpacking plants in Iowa.

This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Monday, June 22nd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Okay, so it is not just in Florida where younger adults, that's people in

their 20s and 30s, are a big chunk of the new coronavirus cases. In Seattle, it's nearly half. This is also happening in California, Texas, the Carolinas, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Colorado. Public health experts say there are a couple of reasons for this. First, more young people are getting tested. At the beginning of the pandemic, tests were only available to people at highest risk, which was mostly older people or people with symptoms. And second, once the reopening started, younger people felt like because they weren't at higher risk of getting sick or dying, they could go back out and mix with other people. People really then breathed

a sigh of relief, kind of opened up, did everything out there through caution to the wind. And I think we're starting to pay the price for it. And people really have to change their behaviors now or we're going to all regret it. That's Dr. Mark Boom, CEO of Houston Methodist Hospital. The big worry for public health officials is that young people are bringing the virus home and spreading it to older and higher risk family members. Bill Miller, an epidemiologist at Ohio State, says if you're planning a trip to see your grandparents, it's not a bad idea to adopt a quarantine mindset to limit your exposure to other people for 10 to 14 days before you go. So once you're there, you basically just want to keep your bubble intact. You don't want to be going out and, you know, going to theme parks or museums and that sort of thing, even if the

grandparents don't go along, right? That's the thing to remember is if you're sharing the house, everything that you do is shared with the elderly folks. There's more reporting from Allison Aubrey on what to consider when visiting elderly relatives in our episode notes. Meatpacking plants are still seeing coronavirus outbreaks. Across the country, thousands of people who work in these plants have been infected. In Iowa, some 10,000 refugees from Myanmar work in meatpacking plants, which means that without the ability to practice social distancing, their community is disproportionately at risk.

Kate Payne of Iowa Public Radio has the story. One advocacy group says all its clients from Myanmar have either had the virus or been exposed to it. Of course, in the beginning, we were really scared and panicked. And when they received a positive, so they think that they are going to die. That's Pastor Benjamin Songboy of Carson Chin Baptist Church in Columbus Junction in southeast Iowa. In the past decade, the ethnic Chin community there has grown to be nearly 20 percent of the population in this meatpacking town of 2,300. At least 221 workers at one meatpacking plant there have tested positive, and two have died. Pastor Sangboy says while employees know the risks of the production line, there's virtually no other work in town.

If they don't go to work, how they will survive, that is a big question. And of course, every family concerned about that. Sangboy has become something of a one-person social service agency during the pandemic. He's counseled people over the phone as they self-isolated, interpreted for them at their doctor's appointments, and delivered food to their doorsteps. COVID has left refugees even more vulnerable than normal as they face barriers to transportation, social services, and even basic information. Abigail Swee of the Iowa Refugee Rights Group in Bark says adjusting to life in the U.S. is a huge challenge for families who have spent years in refugee camps. According to the group, lack of English proficiency is a major challenge, as is a lack of interpreters. Families that are self-isolated in their homes need for food delivery, not a phone number to the food pantry.

They need food delivered to their door, and we are doing that. One person doing that work is Victoria Wah, a refugee from the Karen ethnic group. She also staffs a multilingual phone line for refugees, answering questions on how to file for unemployment, how to call in sick, and when to dial 911 for help. Even as coronavirus cases increase in parts of the country, many meatpacking plants are pushing production levels back up to full capacity and reverting to stricter attendance policies. Victoria Wah says she doesn't know of any other jobs for those in her community. Like the meatpacking place is like only the option for like people from my community.

And I don't know about like other factory that they can like work. Her brother recently reunited with her in Waterloo, but like thousands before him, he'll have few options other than processing pigs in a nearby meatpacking plant. Iowa Public Radio's Kate Payne. Supplies for coronavirus testing have been hard to get in the United States. First, there are the swabs, those things that look like long Q-tips

that are used to collect samples from the nose. And then there's the transport media, that's the vials of chemicals that keep a sample fresh while it's taken to the lab. The Trump administration says it has been trying to increase testing by shipping these critical supplies. But it turns out the supplies haven't always been very helpful, and in some cases, they're dangerous. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein talked to NPR's Sarah McCammon about this on All Things Considered. What's the problem then? Well, let's start with the swabs. There have been several problems. One is big boxes of swabs have been showing up in labs in bulk packages.

Here's how Bill Whitmar, the president of the Association for Public Health Laboratories, describes a problem that causes. Instead of having an individual swab in a sterile sleeve, and you can hear the sleeve on this one, these swabs are sent to us in boxes of 180 swabs in a box, not individually wrapped. If we're going to use these swabs to swab patients one after the next, you're having to reach inside a box to grab swab after swab after swab, potentially contaminating the swabs that are inside this box. So Whitmer says he's got thousands of these swabs just sitting in boxes in a warehouse, while labs are still scrambling every day to get enough swabs to test people. And that's just one problem.

There's an entirely different problem with another swab. Let's listen to what he said about that. In the case of the one I'm holding in my hand right now, the shaft is too long. This type of swab that we really like to see has a scoring around the shaft so that when you place the swab into the tube, the nurse can break the shaft of the swab and the swab fits neatly inside. But as it stands with this particular swab, I am wiggling back and forth and I am unable to break this shaft off. So a range of problems with these test swabs, Rob. Is that all? No, there's another problem with the kind of transport media the federal government has been shipping to labs.

It contains a chemical that can produce cyanide gas, which can be deadly when it comes into contact with bleach. And one of the testing machines uses bleach to clean itself. So that could obviously be a big problem. In fact, one lab in Rhode Island had to call in a hazmat team when they realized they had used this transport media on a sample collected from a nursing home. Here's David Pieper from Yale, which is associated with that lab. It obviously was not good. It should have been avoided in the first place. Fortunately, no one was injured, but I think it was a near miss. And what is the Trump administration saying about all this?

I asked Admiral Brett Giroir about the swab problems. He's the Trump administration's testing czar, and he basically dismissed the complaints as kind of bellyaching. Now, yes, there are some labs that say, I would prefer a different type of swab. We are not in a menu situation where everyone can have filet mignon on the menu. You're going to have to have the chicken dish or the salmon because we do not have all of a single type of swab. If you want the custom-flocked swab from Italy, you're not going to get that because, number one,

there's not enough to go around. There's not a global supply. So, you know, that's the administration's view. Bill Whitmore, when I talked to him about this, he said, look, you know, we understand there can be problems in the rush to get enough testing. But, you know, he's worried that if you start to compromise quality enough, it could really start to affect the accuracy of the tests. And then, you know, when you're trying to control a major pandemic like this, the testing could become part of the problem, not part of the solution. That was NPR health correspondent Rob Stein.

Additional reporting in this episode came from Will Stone. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station. And in our daily coronavirus newsletter, The New Normal, you can sign up at npr.org slash newsletters. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening to the show. We will be back with more tomorrow. Hey, I'm Sam Sanders, host of It's Been a Minute. There is a lot going on in the world. So on my show, my guest and I make sense of the news and culture through conversation. It feels like we're living in three movies at once. That's a good way to put it. It feels like a Mike Judge movie. It feels like a Spike Lee movie. And it feels like a Michael Bay movie.

Every Tuesday and Friday, listen and subscribe now to It's Been a Minute from NPR.