Consider This from NPR - Trump's Unfulfilled Promises; What Contact Tracing Could Look Like

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Exactly one month ago, President Trump declared a national emergency and promised a mobilization of public and private resources to attack the coronavirus. NPR's Investigations Team finds that few of those promises have come to pass.The CDC says they'll soon release a plan to help state and local governments with contact tracing, but Massachusetts has already started building its own contact tracing system.NPR's Allison Aubrey discusses why some are more vulnerable to COVID-19 than others, and looks ahead at what opening up the country may look like.And if you're one of the many families feeling a budget squeeze right now, Life Kit has some tips for you. NPR's Investigations Team's full story on each claim Trump made one month agoTips on budgeting from Life Kit. 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

At this point, if current federal guidelines were to stay as they are, there would only be three more weeks of social distancing. White House officials haven't said yet whether that guidance will be extended, but it is only guidance. Mayors and governors are the ones who actually issue stay-at-home orders, and they are promising to work together to make these decisions on their own. The worst can be over, and it is over, unless we do something reckless. And you can turn those numbers on two or three days of reckless behavior. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, along with governors in other northeastern states,

have formed a regional advisory group to plan for when they think social distancing should be relaxed. And they say that will not happen soon. It's not going to be we flick a switch and everybody comes out of their house and gets in their car and waves and hugs each other and the economy all starts up. California, Oregon and Washington announced a similar regional agreement today. Coming up, one state is trying to figure out what widespread contact tracing might look like and the chronic conditions that seem to make

the coronavirus more deadly for some people. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It is Monday, April 13th. 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. Exactly one month ago today, March 13th, on a sunny day in Washington.

Beautiful day in the Rose Garden. Appreciate everybody being here. President Trump had a news conference with his coronavirus task force. To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency. Two very big words. That meant money would go to state and local governments fighting the pandemic. And the president promised the private sector was stepping up, too. Some of these folks we know, they're celebrities in their own right. They're the biggest business people, the greatest retailers anywhere in the world.

Executives from some of America's biggest retailers were there. CVS. We all know CVS. Doug McMillan from Walmart, and I'd like to have Doug. Richard, please. Walgreens, thank you. Brian Cornell, Target. Well, Mr. President, thank you for inviting us. The president promised drive-through testing would soon be available in these companies' parking lots located in critical areas. The goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed without having to leave your car. One month later, those four national retailers, Walmart, Target, CVS, and Walgreens, have opened a grand total of eight testing sites. Target hasn't opened any, and it says it's not in a formal partnership

with the federal government. Across the board, a report by Tim Mack and the NPR investigative team has found the administration overpromised what private sector companies would do, in some cases because there weren't enough conversations about what they could do. I want to thank Google.

Google is helping to develop a website. The president also said a Google website would screen people to help decide who should be tested. It's going to be very quickly done. And then the site would point people to a nearby drive-thru testing location and then send them the results. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now.

They've made tremendous progress. Thing is, Google was not working on a site. Another company owned by Google's parent company was, and the result was a pilot project that was only available to people in five California counties. It'll go very quickly. It's going very quickly. Also, the president said the development of tests was being fast-tracked. Which will bring additionally 1.4 million tests on board next week, and 5 million within a month I doubt we'll need anywhere near that.

Today, the U.S. has done fewer than 3 million tests. The diagnostic labs say they lack critical supplies and national standards to prioritize who gets tested. The NPR investigations team has a look at more plans the president announced and why some of those plans never materialized. A link to that story is in our episode notes. So the next goal in this pandemic

is something known as contact tracing. That's when public health officials test people for COVID-19. And when someone tests positive, that person is isolated. And officials then trace that person's contacts. The goal is to identify everyone that person came in close contact with and isolate those people, too. There are too many cases in the U.S. right now to do nationwide contact tracing and not enough public health workers yet. But federal officials are watching Massachusetts to see if a state contact tracing program could be scaled up. Here's Martha Biebinger from Member Station WBUR in Boston. Dr. Joya Mukherjee is the chief medical

officer at Partners in Health. It's a Boston-based nonprofit that in the past has run contact tracing projects like for Ebola in West Africa. Mukherjee sees it as going on the offensive because she says the current defensive strategy is not enough. The defensive is we're going to get creamed, right? And let's just make sure our hospitals are staffed. What we're saying is let's use tools that can reach into that silent epidemic and start to cut that off. Here's how it will work. Partners in Health is hiring a thousand contact tracers who will call people who have tested positive. The tracers will ask them for names of everyone they had close contact with. Close here means being within six feet of someone

for more than a brief interaction. Then the tracers will call those people and send them for testing. The next step is isolation for everyone who tests positive. That means staying at home for at least two weeks. If you don't have an extra room to isolate or do not have a home, Massachusetts plans to offer to put you up somewhere, maybe a hotel or dorm. It's going to be a huge job. I know that we will succeed somewhat and we will fail somewhat. We won't be able to find every single person, but we will hopefully prevent a lot of deaths. And the effort, if it works, might allow Massachusetts to lift social distancing requirements sooner than other states.

But there are lots of hurdles. A big one? Still not enough rapid tests. Dr. Sandro Galea, dean at the Boston University School of Public Health, says while more testing and quicker lab work is promised, it's not clear when that's coming. I suppose the answer is unfolding in real time. Whether we'll have the tools tomorrow remains to be seen. Galeo also wishes this could have been done earlier. He says contact tracing is most effective in an emerging epidemic, before something like the coronavirus has spread. It is certainly late. Had we had the tests and were we organized enough to do contact tracing right up front, it would have potentially taken us down a very different path in this epidemic. But Galea says contact tracing might help avoid a second wave of infections.

Massachusetts may be rolling out the most robust expansion of contact tracing, but Utah, North Dakota, and other states are also launching projects. The price tag in Massachusetts, $44 million, may be daunting. But Governor Charlie Baker told reporters that contact tracing is a quote, powerful tool the state must try to prevent more infections. We need to get out ahead of this and do everything we possibly can here in Massachusetts through and in the aftermath of the surge. Partners in Health is collaborating with community health centers in Massachusetts to do the tracing. That means the centers can bring back employees they had to furlough recently when elective medical care stopped.

And it connects people to clinics where they could be tested and speak to a nurse or doctor. That was Martha Biebinger reporting from WBUR in Boston. Public health officials are beginning to plan for a return to some kind of normalcy and what it will take to get even parts of the country open again. Morning Edition host Rachel Martin talked to NPR's Alison Aubrey about that and also about the pre-existing conditions that are making some people more vulnerable to COVID-19 than others. Conditions like high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. Ones that affect some Americans disproportionately.

There are a bunch of factors here. For starters, there is a higher prevalence of diabetes and obesity among African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. These are two of the conditions linked to more serious illness. In addition, Mark Morial of the National Urban League told me, you know, Black workers are more likely to hold the kinds of jobs that you can't do from home. So African Americans and Hispanics may be more likely to be exposed to this virus due to more close contact with others. And as Anthony Fauci, the top advisor, has pointed out, there are longstanding health disparities in the country and inequities in access to health care that need to be addressed going forward. Let's look ahead now, if we could.

I think everybody is anxious to know when life can start to get back to whatever normal is going to be now. What are officials looking at? What are the factors going into that decision? Well, public health officials are looking at a whole bunch of factors. I spoke to Scott Gottlieb, he's the former FDA commissioner, and he says one key indication to look for is a sustained decline in new cases. Now, that's going to vary depending on where you are, right? So reopening the country won't be like flipping a switch. It is not going to happen everywhere all at once. It will be gradual, staggered in different regions.

And the new normal is likely to feel very different. Right. So tomorrow, the president is expected to announce yet another group. He's referring to it as the Opening Our Country Council. What do we know about it? Well, he says it's going to be a bipartisan group that will include scientists and business leaders. And look, there's going to be some tension here because there is, of course, an urgency to get the economy moving again, to get people back to work. But it's also important to continue to

protect people's health, right? So Scott Gottlieb says states may take the lead here. And as restrictions are lifted, there are going to need to be systems in place to prevent another outbreak. We're going to hear more in the coming weeks about surveillance systems to track for illness, about contact tracing. And in the coming months, we're going to get more data on drugs that may be helpful to treat people with COVID. If you have those two tools in your toolbox, a drug that can help prevent disease and rescue people, coupled with a surveillance system that's very aggressive at identifying spread within a local community, within a city, I think that's a robust enough set of tools that this could become a livable threat, that we can get back to a fairly normal way of life and be able to

mitigate the risk from coronavirus even before we have a vaccine in place. Now, life will never be perfectly the same until we have a vaccine that can fully vanquish it. And that's at least a year off. So even when social distancing is relaxed, we'll probably continue to see things like limits on big public gatherings. NPR's Alison Aubrey talking to Morning Edition host Rachel Martin. If you are struggling to pay your bills right now, if you're waiting on a stimulus or an unemployment check, we have some advice from our friends over at LifeKit. Kathy Hauer, a financial planner in South Carolina, says she's giving people advice she's never given before. Defer as many payments as possible and worry about it later.

But she says don't just ignore the payments. Make a list of all your upcoming bills. Then call each company and ask for forbearance. They might be able to delay your payment or put you on a more affordable plan. This is the one time where it's OK to make minimum payments on your credit card. Greg McBride is chief financial analyst with Bankrate.com. He says now is the time to focus on your day-to-day needs. You can get forbearance on your mortgage or your car loan. You can catch up on those later.

There's no catching up when it comes to putting food on the table or acquiring the medicine that you need to stay healthy. You can find a link to the full list of advice and to NPR reporter Yuki Noguchi's story about how to pay your bills 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 and in our daily coronavirus newsletter, The New Normal. You can sign up at npr.org slash newsletters. We will be back tomorrow. I'm Kelly McEvers.