Consider This from NPR - Georgia's Plan To Reopen; Anti-Shutdown Protests And Fox News

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Posthumous autopsy results revealed the first U.S. death from COVID-19 happened much earlier than previously thought.The state of Georgia will reopen parts of its economy on Friday, even as members of the White House coronavirus task force can't say how all parts of the state could safely do so. NPR's David Folkenflik reports on the link between Fox News and anti-shutdown protests.Plus, a website that recreates the sounds of your office.NPR's reporting on the NIH's recommendation against doctors using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.Listen to the latest episode of NPR's Rough Translation 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

We thought the first people to die from COVID-19 in the U.S. died in Seattle on February 26th. Now, autopsy results from two people who died here in California show that they died of the coronavirus much earlier. One died on February 17th, the other on February 6th. What these deaths tell us is that we had community transmission probably to a significant degree far earlier than we had known. Dr. Sarah Cody, Santa Clara County's chief medical officer, where those two people died. And what this means is the virus was probably here in the U.S. much earlier than we

thought. Coming up, the link between Fox News and those anti-stay-at-home protests you've heard about, and how tracking and tracing people with the coronavirus looks very different in South Korea. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Wednesday, April 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. All right, well, good afternoon, everyone. While most of the country is still at home, the state of Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp said this week, is getting ready to reopen. We will allow gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body art studios, barbers, cosmetologists, hair designers, nail care artists. All kinds of businesses can open on Friday and theaters and restaurants on Monday if they follow social distancing and sanitation

guidelines. We are on track to meet the gating criteria for phase one. Phase one of the federal government guidelines call for 14 straight days of declining cases. According to data from Johns Hopkins, though, Georgia is not close to that. And less than 1% of the population has been tested. You know, it's like you don't even know because we are in very close proximity with the client. We're in their faces. TJ Johnson says at his Atlanta barbershop, you're right in your client's face. You know, even with masks, we don't know what they've touched. You don't even know what's going on. And there's no way for us even to test them. Johnson says he is going to open this week,

but he doesn't think there'll be any business. Look, everybody's hurting. Our community is. Our businesses are. But, you know, a second surge is very possible. Scott Steiner is CEO of Phoebe Putney Health System in southwest Georgia, which has one of the highest per capita COVID rates in the world. We've had almost 100 people die in Doherty County. We don't want another 100 or more or 200. At the White House on Tuesday,

Dr. Deborah Birx was a little indirect when she was asked how it would be possible for a hair salon to reopen and still follow national guidelines for social distancing. So I'm not going to prejudge, but we have told people very clearly and the president guidelines made it very clear about the expectations of phase one. Birx said basically people should look at the data where they live. I believe people in Atlanta would understand that if their cases are not going down, that they need to continue to do everything that we said, social distancing, washing your hands, wearing a mask in public. So if there's a way that people can social distance and do those things, then they can do those things. I don't know how, but people are very creative. Governor Kemp did say the state's own

stay-at-home order is still in effect until midnight next Thursday, which, yes, confusingly, is almost a full week after reopening begins. Reporter Emma Hurt, who's been covering all this for NPR from member station WABE in Atlanta, brought us the voices you heard from Georgia. You might have seen the news that some people in some parts of the country are protesting against shutdown orders. These protests are pretty small, but the protesters are getting inspiration from many places.

One of them is Fox News, and that is causing people to criticize the network, which led the Fox News president to try and privately rein in his stars this week. Here's NPR's David Fulkenflik on that. There are few major media outlets more devoted to the fortunes of President Trump than Fox News. As Trump has blasted governors setting down restrictive policies to combat the pandemic, so has Fox. They want to keep us locked in our homes. They want to keep us away from churches and synagogues. They want to make sure we don't go back to work. There's Fox host Jeanine Pirro, a Trump ally, advisor and fan, slamming governors, mostly Democrats at that, and egging on the people protesting against them. They don't get it. The American spirit is too strong and Americans are not going to take it.

Public health officials say the coronavirus can easily be spread by people packed together, like, say, at a protest. Fox hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and others have cheered the protests, usually from the safety of their own home studios, yet have done so without explicitly noting the risks involved. Take Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade announcing future spots with the precision of a train conductor. They're protesting in Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia. And as more and more states go online and get their rights back, that is going to fuel, I believe, other states to go, wait a second, this is getting ridiculous. So what Fox does is it takes this very small phenomenon and not only amplifies it, but gives it a particular political meaning. Nicole Hemmer is a Columbia University scholar who studies conservative media.

She says the protests are about a lot of things, including gun and property rights issues. But on Fox, they're a way to channel support for a president under siege. It lets people know that there are upcoming rallies, much like we saw back in the day of the Tea Party, as a way of not just throwing light on what's happening, amplifying these protests, but also encouraging them as well. Fox has gotten pushback publicly from critics, but it's also stirred some internal friction. On Monday, Fox News President Jay Wallace sent around a memo directing journalists to remind the public on the air that for those who do protest, social distancing is a must.

That's according to someone with direct knowledge. Shortly after, Fox host Harris Faulkner interrupted Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee's soaring tribute to the protesters. Well, I think the key is understanding that they're not protesting social distancing. They're not protesting wearing masks. They're not protesting taking good care and washing hands and doing those things. What they're protesting is over the top regulations. Demonstrators were shown on screen at that very moment, clustered together in bunches, mostly without masks. Even so, later that night, Fox News primetime star Laura Ingraham sang the protester praises once more,

landing right back where she and Fox had started. NPR's David Fokenflik. By the way, another story that got a lot of play on Fox News was the possibility that a drug called hydroxychloroquine could be an effective therapeutic for coronavirus patients. This week, a panel of experts convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recommended against doctors using it because of potential links to sudden cardiac death.

That institute is headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. You can find a link to an NPR story about that in our episode notes. Yesterday on the show, we talked about why the U.S. might need hundreds of thousands of people to trace and track people who have been exposed to the coronavirus. That's so you can know if you have been in contact with someone who has tested positive. It's called contact tracing, and in South Korea, they're already doing it, but at the cost of individual privacy. On NPR's podcast Rough Translation, reporter Anthony Kuhn told host Gregory Warner how it works.

It starts, he said, with an alert on your phone. The last one I got was like four hours ago, and it says that anyone who's been to Jack's Bar, which is a couple of subway stops away from me, Anyone who's been there in the past few weeks needs to self-isolate, and if they show symptoms, then they need to go get tested for the disease. Anthony hasn't signed up to receive these warnings. The government knows that he lives within a close radius of Jack's Bar. On average, I get about, say, four to six of these emergency alerts a day. I click on a link in that emergency alert, and it takes me to my district government site. Each case of COVID-19 in Anthony's district is assigned a number. And this was about case number 15.

Okay, so I go look up patient 15. Patient 15 is a Korean national, female, in her 20s, and she works at this place called Jack's Bar in Itaewon. She goes to work at about 5 in the afternoon. She gets off at about 3 or 4 in the morning. So on this website, on the government website, you can see that she's been tracked from these data points. We see her going to markets and to drugstores and to hospitals. You see her trail? Yeah.

We know when she walks. We know when she walks, we know when she drives, we know when she's wearing a mask or not. Wait, you know when she's wearing a mask or not? Yeah. Okay, some of this they get from interviewing her, some of this they get from surveillance camera footage. So we know that, for example, on the 27th of March, she got off work a few hours early because she was feeling aches and pains. So she feels sick enough to leave work early on March 27th, but she doesn't get tested. On March 30th, she goes up to a pork restaurant just up the street from my apartment,

and she eats there from 6 p.m. to 6.50 p.m. On April 3rd, she goes and gets tested. The next day, the results come back. She's positive. That afternoon, she goes straight into quarantine. And then this afternoon, four hours ago, I get this message saying, if I've been in Jack's, Jack's Bar in Itaewon, then I need to self-isolate. So that's how it works. Do you know her name? No. But really, how many bartenders at Jack's Bar are women in their 20s living in that particular district and working that particular

shift. We know that at a certain time, she went to stay with an acquaintance nearby that may set people off speculating about who that acquaintance was. But how does it keep me safe? How does it help me avoid the virus to know that patient 15 is in her 20s? Or to know that she is a she? Why do I need to create that story? Anthony says that these stories actually help the warning stick. And they encourage people to share stories of their own. Like, oh, I know that bartender. She was talking to my friend.

And then I maybe call that friend, and the friend gets tested. The more they tell me, the safer I feel, and the more I'm willing friend, and the friend gets tested. The more they tell me, the safer I feel, and the more I'm willing to trust the government's directives. Gregory Warner, host of NPR's podcast, Ref Translation, a link to their full episode, where you can hear more about contact tracing in South Korea, is in our episode notes. It's strange what you start to miss being cooped up at home. For Fred Wordy, it was the sound of an office. You really do miss those annoying human sounds that happen in the office, and they do keep you motivated and keep you inspired. Fred works for the Kids Creative

Agency in Berlin, and he told NPR's Morning Edition that when he and his colleagues started working from home, things seemed a little quiet. So they made a website to bring the office closer. You can hear a bubbling water cooler, ping pong table, that co-worker who types very passionately. The office noise generator lets you click on the parts of the room that you want to hear. You can add coworkers, but if their humming is annoying, you can subtract them.

I really like the guy chewing loudly. People have complained about it. But it's good that you can't smell his food. Fred says the control is what makes the project work. Office sounds are often quite annoying, but with this website, you can just turn it off. You have that power. That's why this is soothing, whereas in real life, it's actually a bit more antagonizing. For more news on the coronavirus, your local public radio station can keep you up to date.

This is Coronavirus Daily. I'm Kelly McEvers.