Consider This from NPR - Surprising Job Gains Are Good News — But Not For Everyone

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Editor's note: In this episode, we mispronounced the name of professor Sven-Eric Jordt.It looks like another weekend of protests across the country. And that means more people could be exposed to tear gas, pepper spray and other "chemical irritants" that trigger — among other things — coughing and sneezing. Two things people are trying to avoid during this pandemic. Americans are skipping payments on mortgages, auto loans and other bills due to the economic impact of the pandemic. And as NPR's Chris Arnold reports, for some, catching up is going to be painful.Plus, the coronavirus has hit people of color especially hard. As Harvard's David Williams writes in an article for the Washington Post, before COVID-19, Black Americans were already struggling with the health effects of everyday discrimination. The pandemic is only making it worse. And NPR's Short Wave team takes us to San Francisco where Hispanics and Latinxs make up 46% of all coronavirus cases ⁠— but they make up just 15% of the population. Don't forget to check out Short Wave on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and NPR One. 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. Today, for some people, there was good news that economists did not expect. Despite the pandemic and the protests and the pain of this moment, about 2.5 million people went off unemployment in May. A lot of those people work in restaurants and bars, which are reopening all over. But still, the unemployment rate is the highest it's been in generations. And for Black Americans, there was no improvement.

The way that I like to summarize what's going on in the COVID-19 economy is that there are basically three main groups of workers. Valerie Wilson with the Economic Policy Institute says there's one group who have lost their jobs. Then there are the essential workers who keep working even though it puts them at risk of getting sick. And then there's a third group, people who've been okay because they mostly are working from home. Black workers are least likely to be in that last group. So you're either facing elevated economic insecurity or you're having to make difficult choices between economic security and health security. Coming up, we know the virus has hit Latino and Hispanic Americans hard, too. But some simply can't afford to find out they are positive.

This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Friday, June 5th. 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. It's looking like another weekend of big protests. That could mean more tear gas, pepper spray, or other quote-unquote chemical irritants in the air in cities across the country.

I call these gases, in fact, more like pain gas. Stephen Eric Yort studies these pain gases at Duke University. You have this excruciating pain, sneezing, coughing, the production of a lot of mucus that obstructs breathing. Coughing and sneezing in a large group of people is obviously not a good thing right now. And on top of that, a 2014 study of army recruits found that those exposed to tear gas as part of a training exercise, were more likely to get sick with a respiratory illness, like the flu. Using it in the current situation with COVID-19 around is completely irresponsible. This is a recipe for disaster.

The pandemic still rages. And standing shoulder to shoulder with others is not really wise in this moment. David Williams studies social influences on health at Harvard. He says, yeah. As a public health professional, I am concerned. At the same time, as a Black man in America, I understand where people are coming from. I understand the pain. I understand the anguish. I understand the frustration. Williams told NPR there's more to health than just preventing the coronavirus, especially for people of color.

Science has shown that everyday discrimination takes a toll, too. Higher levels of everyday discrimination leads to higher levels of high blood pressure. It leads to higher levels of inflammation, and high levels of inflammation puts you at risk for virtually every chronic disease. Pregnant women who report everyday discrimination give birth to lower birth weight infants. Williams says the virus is one public health challenge

on top of another. Protesting in the streets could lead to more people getting sick. And that gets even more likely if protesters are detained and held inside in crowded conditions. I think there are some individuals who feel even at the risk of their health, this is a moment when they cannot be silent, when their voice has to be heard and feel compelled to go out. David Williams recently wrote about the health effects of racism on people of color in the Washington Post. We've got a link to that in our episode notes. In 42 states plus Washington, D.C., Hispanics and Latinos make up a greater share of confirmed coronavirus cases than their share of the population.

In San Francisco, public health officials wanted to know why the Latinx community is being so badly affected. So they decided to test thousands of people in one neighborhood, the Mission District. And they did it with the help of a community group called the Latino Task Force for COVID-19. NPR's daily science podcast, Shortwave, took a look at how they did it and what they learned. Here's Shortwave host, Maddie Sophia. To start, they needed to pick one specific area to test. So they went with a part of the mission, a census tract, that had a lot of people in a relatively small area. Next, they had to figure out how to test everybody.

I think this is where the Latino Task Force plays a huge role in that, as I alluded to earlier, many of us are born and raised here and know the intimacies of this neighborhood. We know our neighbors. We know the corner store owners, the clerks. So John Jacobo and other community volunteers got to organizing, big time. We did four days of outreach. We recruited 400 volunteers over an eight-day period to go out for the first four days and knock on 1,400 doors four times, phone bank those individual homes and leaflet to let people know that we were going to be doing COVID testing for everybody that lived within a particular census tract. They set up pop-up testing sites in places like community centers or at public parks, like this one, Garfield Square.

So let's all, we all need a social distance. Nurses, doctors, and volunteers in protective gear worked to test as many people as they could. Any symptoms of fever? No. Any dry coughing? No. Volunteers even ended up going to the homes of people

who couldn't come out to get tested. And aside from all the logistical difficulty of getting this many people organized, John says they also had to tackle other things, like mistrust. You know, who's doing this study? You know, am I putting myself in jeopardy if maybe I'm undocumented? Am I putting myself at risk here? But beyond that, there was fear of testing positive. You know, we have people that literally said, I'm symptom free. I don't want to know if I have it because if I do, I have to miss work. And I think that is one of the realist points that hit us where we had to think through, OK, when these people inevitably do test coronavirus, about 2% of who they tested.

But here's the thing. Even though more than a third of the people tested were white, everybody who tested positive was a person of color. 100% of them were people of color, 95.1% being Latino, and the remaining 4.9% being Asian Pacific Islander. Were you surprised by any of the results? You know, the fact is, yeah, I actually was. You know, I thought, you know, high percentage,

but never 95%. I never thought that it would be 100% people of color. John wasn't the only one thrown off by this. Here's Dr. Karina Marquez. We had not looked within the community, and this was more stark than I expected. The large majority of positive cases were folks who lived in households of three or more people. And lastly, because these tests were done well into shelter-in-place, the team wanted to look at if working from home made a difference.

When they asked everyone they tested if they could work from home, 43% of those people said, yeah, I can work from home. But 90% of those who tested positive said they couldn't. They're either still working outside of the home, they're our essential workers, they're the people keeping our city running. And then a component of those people were also recently unemployed or furloughed as well. I think the take-home message from that work-in-home question

was being able to shelter in place and work from home is really a privilege. And it's the people that have to go out and work and who are essential workers that are at high risk. Dr. Karina Marquez talking to shortwave host Maddie Sophia. The government has been helping millions of Americans to make monthly payments on mortgages, car loans, and other bills. But those benefits have not been going to everyone. And if you have missed some of those payments, catching up might be hard. Here's NPR's Chris Arnold.

Lawmakers and lenders of all kinds are trying to build a financial bridge to the future for people who've lost their income in the pandemic. But experts warn that the bridge is only half built. For one thing, the help isn't reaching some people that need it. My name is Jonathan Baird. We live in Brewston, Tennessee, and I am a disabled veteran. Baird gets a small disability pension, but after the pandemic hit, his wife lost her job as a home health aide.

That was most of their income. And as a contract worker, she's run into delays with unemployment. My wife has filed certified every week for her unemployment for 10 weeks now, and they have done nothing. We've struggled. Barrett says his mortgage company told him that he didn't qualify for a federal program to postpone payments, but many homeowners have been given wrong or misleading information from lenders,

and it appears that's what happened in Baird's case. He also called Ford Motor Company to try to get a break on the payments for his pickup truck. When I contacted them, they told me that there was nothing they could do. Just basically make your payment or suffer the late fees. Barrett says a call center worker told him that since he was late on a car payment last year, he didn't qualify for any help. After NPR contacted Ford, the company said that is not its policy and Ford is now letting him skip a payment, which he says is a big help. You know, we're paycheck to paycheck like most people. And when you take

away that paycheck, especially for this length of time, we have to make the decision of vehicle or food. And many people are getting help. According to the credit bureau, TransUnion, about 3 million auto loans are in some kind of program to let people skip or make partial payments as our 15 million credit card accounts. And those are low estimates. But looking ahead, advocates say that people could run into big trouble because the terms of these hardship programs can be all over the map. Araceli Panameno is with the Center for Responsible Lending. She says when it comes time to make up for all those skipped payments, there are federal

rules for home mortgages, but not for many other types of loans. So she says lawmakers need to protect people here. Otherwise, she says lenders could make demands beyond what people can afford. You must have a capacity to catch up with your payments in an affordable way. For their part, many lenders say to keep helping people, they need a government conduit through which to borrow money themselves. Bill Himpler is president and CEO of the American Financial Services Association, which represents lenders who make car loans, personal loans, mortgages, and offer credit cards. If we can't keep the lights on because things have seized up, it's not good for anybody. It's not good for the customer. It's not good for the company. It's not good for the economy. One last big thing that lawmakers need to resolve is whether

to extend expanded unemployment benefits. They're the biggest reason that most people who've lost jobs are able to pay rent and keep a roof over their heads. And while many people are going back to work, many others are still not. Andrew Jakobovic is with the non-profit Enterprise Community Partners. When the $600 a week unemployment insurance runs out at the end of July, most people expect tremendous displacement risk. Evictions are likely to go through the roof. Non-payment is going to be very, very significant. And with eviction moratoriums expiring in parts of the country, he says action is needed right away to help people who can't pay the rent as this pandemic drags on. NPR's Chris Arnold. Additional reporting in this episode came from our colleagues at Shortwave,

All Things Considered, and reporter Will Stone. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station. You can write to us here at the show at coronavirusdailyatnpr.org. The show is produced by Emily Alfin Johnson, Gabriella Saldivia, Anne Lee, Lee Hale and Brent Bachman and edited by Beth Donovan. Thanks for listening. I'm Kelly McEvers. It feels like nothing in the news these days makes any sense. So Hassan Minhaj turned to his father and his faith for answers. He said, don't worry about the number of questions. Just worry about which questions become more clear and solidified. Comedian Hassan Minhaj on how his spirituality is getting him through.

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