Consider This from NPR - More Small Business Aid; Antibody Test Results

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

The Paycheck Protection Program was created to help small businesses hit by the pandemic, but the program was exhausted quickly. Now congress has secured another round of funding.Recovering from COVID-19 can be a long journey. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on the oftentimes grueling process.Experts say contact tracing and antibody testing are crucial steps for reopening the country. Plus, a look at one part of the economy that never closed. Must-run factories operating around the clock have lessons for other businesses about how to keep workers safe.Listen to Life Kit's episode on how to spot misinformation 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

Less than a month ago, Congress created a $350 billion loan program that was supposed to help small businesses survive. And that program is already out of money. Key Bank of Cleveland told me that they usually handle 50 loans a month. They were handling 800 an hour during the peak. Economist David Wessel says some banks that were tasked with distributing the loans were overwhelmed by demand. And there were questions about who qualified. Some banks figured it was easier to make big loans, a few of them, than a lot of small loans. Now it looks like Congress has a deal to replenish the program.

Coming up, two critical things that have to happen before we reopen, in addition to more testing, and the factories in America that never closed. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Tuesday, April 21st. We talk a lot about testing on this show and how we need much, much more of it before anyone can think about safely reopening. But testing is not the only piece of the puzzle. So the important thing is really to reach out to each and every person and trying to understand who they've been in touch with during the period they were infectious or a few days before. Dr. Joya Mukherjee is the chief medical officer at Partners in Health. That's a nonprofit working on a program in Massachusetts for contact tracing. She told NPR's Morning Edition that contact tracing is a process that starts with a phone call to a person who tests positive.

And with that, you enumerate a list of their contacts. And those contacts then are also called to let them know that they've been in touch with somebody who has COVID-19. And if you get that call, depending on how close your contact was, you might be told to quarantine for 14 days, or maybe just to keep an eye out for any symptoms. Central to that is to have a highly enhanced group of individuals that can actually conduct this contact tracing. CDC Director Robert Redfield told NPR today the CDC is working to help states scale up contact tracing nationwide. He suggested those workers might come from the Census Bureau or the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps. Experts say the U.S. could need as many as 300,000 contact tracers. Right now, there are barely 1,000 across the states. But clearly, as we get closer to next October, November, December,

our nation's going to have to have a substantially enhanced public health workforce so that during what I call the second wave of the coronavirus infection, we have the public health resources to stay in the containment mode. That's the key. We've got to stay in containment mode. And that is just one step to reopening. Another is antibody tests. So what we find is that about 4% of adults in Los Angeles County have had a COVID infection. USC professor Neeraj Sood led a study here in L.A., where I live,

one of the first to try to figure out how many people have actually been infected. The answer, an estimated 4% of adults, is way higher than expected. That would mean at least 200,000 people in L.A. County have already been infected. The number of known positive cases here was barely 8,000 at the time of the study. At the same time, Sud told NPR's Here and Now 4% of the total population is still a really small number. Most experts think that you achieve or a population achieves herd immunity at somewhere at 60% infection rate. So we are very far away from 60%. And making things more complicated, antibody tests are far from perfect right now.

A large number give false positives. And this is just one very early study. One thing is clear. We are a long way from herd immunity. That's where enough people have immunity so the virus doesn't spread as widely and even unvaccinated people are somewhat safe. Which is why the search for treatments and a vaccine are so important if we are going to get back to normal life. A return to normal life, by the way, is not always guaranteed for people who recover from serious cases of COVID-19.

NPR's John Hamilton reports the recovery process can be long and grueling. At a veterans hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, a big man in a wheelchair is gliding toward the exit. The man is David Williams, a former Marine who spent a week on a ventilator after getting COVID-19. And hospital staff have lined up to give him a big send-off. That was more than two weeks ago, and Williams, who is 54, is home now with his wife. But he's still tethered to an oxygen machine. I just wear my oxygen. I have like a 100-foot cord. Even so, Williams says he's improved a lot,

especially since he was overweight and out of shape when he got sick. When Williams first woke up, he had almost no control of his arms and legs. And like most patients on a ventilator, he felt parched pretty much all the time. He couldn't drink, so a nurse left him a damp swab to suck on. It took me like five or six minutes just to pick that thing up, to get my fingers actually on it, and my brain telling my hand to lift it up. Williams can feed himself now, but he's still having problems with memory and thinking. It was hard for me to try and recall things, because like right now, it takes me a while to think about the words I need to be able to say now, but I'm slowly getting it back.

If Williams makes a full recovery, he can count himself among the fortunate. Dr. Amy Bellinghausen of the University of California, San Diego, says some COVID-19 survivors will never recover completely. Unfortunately, oftentimes when they're coming off the ventilator, it's not the same person as who went on the ventilator. The condition is known as post-ICU syndrome. Bellinghausen says most patients start out so weak they are nearly helpless. That whole time in the ICU, they're losing muscle mass.

And for many, she says, there's been organ damage. People can have injuries to their lungs. Really, any organ can suffer injury in the ICU. Including the brain. Bellinghausen says one reason is the drugs used to paralyze and sedate patients while they're on a ventilator. The other thing is that patients who have bad lung disease often have times when their oxygen level is very low, and that also causes damage to the brain. Then there's the emotional impact. Bellinghausen says patients who may be delirious from fever or sedatives find themselves trapped in a scary, noisy place

connected to machines that have taken control of their bodily functions. And if someone resists, they may be forcibly restrained. People come out of the ICU with pretty profound symptoms of PTSD sometimes. Bellinghausen says COVID-19 survivors do improve over time, and a few bounce back quickly. Matthew Robertson is 28. He's a tech worker who lives near Seattle. I got to the hospital on February 29th, and then when I woke up, I was looking at the date on the chart that was on my window, and it already said, like, March 7th. Six weeks later, though, he's pretty much back to normal.

I think the only thing that still hasn't properly recovered is the vocal range of my voice. So no karaoke clubs yet. But they're all closed anyway. That was NPR's John Hamilton. While most people look forward to a day when we can go back to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, there are parts of the economy that never closed. Some factories are still up and running, making the stuff we need during this pandemic. Food, face masks, and yes, toilet paper. NPR's Scott Horsley reports on what it takes to keep these factories going and what lessons that might offer for the rest of us. Jose de los Rios is one of the unsung heroes of this pandemic. He's not a doctor or a scientist. He's worked for

almost 30 years at a Procter & Gamble paper goods plant in Mahupany, Pennsylvania. At this plant, we make our Charmin brand, our Bounty brand, and then we make Pampers and Love's diapers. In recent weeks, there's been a squeeze on Charmin toilet paper. Maybe you've heard about it. Delos Rio certainly has. I get a lot of ribbing locally in my neighborhood. At least a third or half of my neighbors stop me and jokingly ask, can I get them some? De Los Rios and his colleagues are making as much toilet paper as they can, running the plant 24 hours a day,

while also trying to protect the health of the more than 2,000 people who work there. Shift changes have been stretched out over three hours to keep workers separated at the plant door. Employees have their temperature taken on the way in, and instead of roaming freely throughout the mile-long plant, workers are compartmentalized with color-coded badges. Every individual got assigned a zone that they were allowed to operate in. It reduces the likelihood of spread of any illness across

the plant. In the beginning, De Los Rios says, it was disruptive and awkward, but workers have adjusted. It's rather comical looking into a break area now. Instead of before, there might have been four or five people to a table. Now it's just one individual with their mask on unless they're eating. A General Mills plant in Wellston, Ohio has adopted similar precautions, erecting a tent in the parking lot so workers can maintain social distance during their breaks. Manager Carolyn Mendel says her plant has stayed extra busy making frozen pizza and pizza rolls. We have seen a lot of feedback from our consumers that the Totino's product line is getting them through quarantine. At a time when many people are homebound and millions out of work,

Mendel's seen a spike in demand for affordable comfort food. There's comfort when mom goes to the grocery store and can find food on the shelf. And we talk about how stressful it is when those shelves are empty. So far, the safety measures appear to be working. There have been no confirmed cases of coronavirus at Mendel's plant or De Los Rios's, although some workers at both facilities have been quarantined as a precaution. Not every factory owner has been so careful. Several meatpacking plants have been forced to shut down after widespread outbreaks among their workers. Former federal safety official Deborah Berkowitz says the government hasn't done enough to police those plants, where workers typically stand shoulder to shoulder on the cutting line. These workers are often very hidden. The plants are often in more rural, sort of remote areas. Therefore, people don't see the set of sacrifices they're making.

Factory managers like Mendel show it is possible to keep products flowing and keep workers safe. Mendel says her workers take a lot of pride in what they're doing. They feel like they're serving the country by coming into the plant and grinding out those pizza and pizza rolls. The Charman plant in Pennsylvania has also started making face masks. But don't worry, they won't skimp on the toilet paper. NPR's Scott Horsley. Okay, so before we go, every day, there's more and more misinformation out there about the coronavirus. So if you see a meme or a chart or an article on social media, just remember,

social media companies have no financial obligation to make sure that what you read on their platforms is true. So do a quick online search. Look for information from the CDC, from the World Health Organization, worldhealth.org, or on fact-checking sites. Snopes.com is a good one. And if you're still not sure the information is true, don't share it. Break the chain. That advice comes from our colleagues at NPR's Life Kit. You can find more in their latest episode on spotting false information

about the pandemic. There's a link in our episode notes. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station or on npr.org. Thanks for listening. I'm Kelly McEvers.