Consider This from NPR - Some Government Aid Checks Will Arrive This Week

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says 80 million Americans should receive economic impact payments by Wednesday. President Trump said during Monday's contentious coronavirus task force briefing that he plans to lift federal guidelines on social distancing soon, falsely claiming that he has "total" authority on the matter. Meanwhile, as an outbreak of COVID-19 in South Dakota closes a major meat processing facility, Governor Kristi Noem continues to reject the idea of a statewide stay-at-home order. Many Americans are reporting that they're having unusually vivid dreams at night. One Bay Area resident started a website for others to share their dreams. Read what others are dreaming about on i dream of covid.Listen to Short Wave's episode, 'How To Talk About The Coronavirus With Friends And Family'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

Check your bank account on Wednesday. There could be more than $1,000 in there from the federal government. We expect that over 80 million hardworking Americans will get the direct deposit by this Wednesday. And if you meet the requirements to get money from the government's economic relief package, but you haven't gotten it by tomorrow, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says you can go to irs.gov, enter your information, and that should work. The quickest way, he said, is to share your direct deposit information. We want to do as much of this electronically as we can. It's very important in this day and age.

It's more secure and you don't have to go to the bank. Coming up, a state without a statewide stay-home order now has a significant outbreak. And how to talk about the coronavirus so your friends and family will listen. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Tuesday, April 14th. 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. So about what happened at the White House on Monday. When somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's got to be. The authority is total. It's total. It's total. And the governor's know that.

The governor's know that. Now you have a couple of bands of... Since the president said that, he has backtracked. On Tuesday, he said that any decision to relax nationwide social distancing guidance would be made, quote, in conjunction with state governors, many of whom had already pointed out correctly that the president's authority is not total. Government's not going to be open via Twitter. We're going to have to make decisions based on the best science, the best medical advice, and what's in the best public health of

the people of our individual states. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, talked to NPR's All Things Considered today. But while it is true that governors hold the power to enforce stay-at-home orders, federal guidance and what the president says, it does matter. Each and every one of us has a critical role to play in stopping the spread and transmission of the virus. In a recent study, the CDC looked at cell phone data from the city of San Francisco to see how often people left their homes. And they found that two events, more than anything else, correlated with people staying home. To close schools. And the other was the president's initial social distancing guidance, announced on March 16th.

This afternoon, we're announcing new guidelines for every American to follow over the next 15 days. While Trump says a decision on federal social distancing guidance is expected soon, governors on the East Coast and the West Coast have announced that they've entered regional PACs to decide together when to start opening things up. Yeah, actually, we've had a dialogue going on for quite a while. Michigan Governor Whitmer said she's talking to her counterparts in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio about doing the same. We know that COVID-19 doesn't respect party line and it doesn't respect state line. And that's why we've all got to share our best information and move

strategically together wherever possible. Governor Gretchen Whitmer talking to host Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered. In the same way that it's up to states when to reopen, some states decided never to close in the first place. One of those is South Dakota, where Republican Governor Kristi Noem rejects the idea of a statewide stay-at-home order. And now in Sioux Falls, more than 400 employees of a Smithfield Foods meat processing plant have tested positive for COVID-19. That plant is now closed. Here's Lee Strubinger of South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The number of COVID-19 cases in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is jumping fast.

Mayor Paul Tenhaken calls it an explosion. The window, though, of time for mitigation is certainly dwindling right now. Tenhaken is asking for a shelter-in-place order from the state. By law, it would take Sioux Falls seven days to enact an ordinance on its own. Our time to act on this is right now. But Republican Governor Kristi Noem, a President Trump ally, has been hesitant to issue any shelter-in-place or statewide stay-at-home orders. I've been very clear about the fact that I don't think decisions in Sioux Falls

are the same decisions that are correct and right for a town like Faith, South Dakota, or Lemon, South Dakota. In two counties, Noem has ordered all people over the age of 65 to stay home. She's also said that people and businesses shall practice CDC guidance. Yeah, I'm not sure that it accomplishes what they hope it would accomplish. That's Drew Harris, population health researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. If you're allowing people to mix within an establishment, essentially interact, then the virus is going to spread. Numbers in South Dakota are relatively low right now, but Harris says without stronger mitigations, cases could rapidly increase.

He likens the epidemic to a prairie wildfire and a stay-at-home order to a firebreak intended to suppress the flame. You always know that some embers are going to jump over the firebreak, start new fires, but they're much more manageable. And you just put out each one of those hotspots one at a time. When it comes to combating the coronavirus, though, Governor Noem does have another idea. Noem said she spent last week urging the White House Coronavirus Task Force to allow South Dakota to begin a statewide trial of hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by the Trump administration as a potential therapeutic for COVID-19.

This would be the first ever state-endorsed, state-backed, statewide clinical trial available in the United States. But in what little research has been done on the drug to treat coronavirus, there have been no reported results. Noem says, though, the trial will put the state on offense against the pandemic. South Dakota Public Broadcasting's Lee Strubinger. By the way, one reason doctors are so cautious about hydroxychloroquine is aside from the lack of scientific evidence that it's an effective treatment for COVID-19, there are side effects. They can include symptoms of heart failure and nightmares.

But maybe these days you're having some pretty intense dreams all on your own. Seems like a lot of us are. That's why Erin Gravely, who lives in the Bay Area, launched a website called idreamofcovid.com, where you can post your coronavirus dreams and look through other people's coronavirus dreams. She talked to All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly about some emerging patterns. You have had responses from all over the world. Give us a couple of the standouts. There actually have been recently a lot from Italy. One that hasn't gone up

yet was somebody who was driving around in the back of an ambulance and the driver was getting more and more frustrated until he basically said, this isn't my job. I'm done with this. So that was a funny one. Ambulance anxiety dreams. Yeah. I mean, it seems as though the ones I was reading seem to run the gamut from really sad, tragic dreams, which makes sense because this is such a sad and tragic time, to crazy, you know, like spread out on a screen in the dream. Are you finding patterns that people, wherever they are in the world, are reporting some common quarantine dreams? Yes. So that's what's interesting is that something about this experience is kind of filtering down into our dreams in similar ways. So one of the earliest patterns that I noticed was people associating hugging with danger or menace. So

there were a couple of dreams where the dreamers described that someone wanted to hug them and it made them very frightened. And even to the point where they would yell like, you're hurting me, you're going to kill me. There's been a lot with food too and restaurants, which was interesting to me because I know that especially in the news, there's been a lot of anxiety about how these businesses are going to maintain while everything is shut down. So lots of anxiety surrounding food. So what does this project look like three months from now, six months from now, a year from now, whenever we are past the worst of this? What will you do with all these submissions that people have sent you? Well, I hope people do continue to submit. I was particularly interested in the patterns.

So I had read this book called The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Barat. And that's where I got the idea. This was a writer and journalist who lived in Germany under Hitler's reign, and she started collecting people's dreams. And she collected enough of them that she was then able to study them more closely. And so the book is organized sort of like these archetypes that started appearing. And that's the part that I'm interested in is sort of seeing geographically and as the rules change or the pandemic changes, how that then transfers into our dreams and what patterns might emerge. So I'd like to look at that. Erin Gravely talking to NPR host Mary Louise Kelly. You can find a link to the website where you can sort dreams by location and topic in our show notes. So this whole coronavirus story is

basically a science story, which means we are all talking to each other about science. A lot. And the experts tell us there are actually good and bad ways to do that. The more you hear something, even if you know it's incorrect, the more it just sort of lingers. There's persistent effects. You've heard it so often that it starts to feel true. Liz Neely is a science communication expert, and she says if a parent or a friend is talking about something like a random cure that they heard about on Facebook,

the best thing to do is to keep the dialogue open and welcoming. You know, maybe what you would say would be like, Hey, Mom, I've been seeing a whole lot of stuff in the news lately about different medications. Some of it's really wrong. Have you been thinking about this? What are you worried about? Liz Neely has a lot of advice for how to talk about this pandemic in the latest episode of Shortwave. That's NPR's daily science podcast. There is a link to that in our episode notes. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date on your local public radio station. And if

you like your news on demand, get a mix of local, national and international news and podcasts whenever you want them. Download NPR One on the App Store. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening to our show. We will be back with more tomorrow.