Consider This from NPR - When To See A Doctor; Policing During The Pandemic

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

California, one of the first states to shutdown, joins a growing list of states that are trying to restart their economies. Customers around the country are deciding if they are comfortable starting to shop again.Law enforcement is adapting to what it means to police during a pandemic.A fever and dry cough are no longer the only official symptoms of COVID-19. NPR's Maria Godoy has tips for when even milder symptoms, like headaches and loss of smell and taste, should prompt you to seek testing. Plus, scientists on a research vessel in Arctic have been isolated from the coronavirus. Some are anticipating what it will be like to return to a society in lock down. 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

Before we get started today, just a quick thing. If you listen to this show, it means public radio is one of your sources for critical information and updates about this pandemic. Public radio is also how we stay connected when we have to be apart. Today is Giving Tuesday Now. That is when nonprofits all over the U.S. are coming together to ask for support during what is, all of us a pretty tough time. So we are asking you to give back to your community today in whatever way you can by supporting your local NPR station. That is the only way to ensure you continue to get news and updates about this pandemic, stories about how people all over the world are responding, and moments of levity that we could all use right now. Visit donate.npr.org daily to make a contribution today if you can. The link is in our episode notes. And thanks.

The hit to our economy has been really, really bad. To get it started again before there's a vaccine raises a really stark question. How many more people will die? Well, you know, it's the balance of something that's a very difficult choice. Like how many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be some form of normality sooner rather than later? Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that all scientists like him can do is level with us about the consequences of reopening. I have to. I feel I have a moral obligation to give the kind of information that I'm giving.

People are going to make their own choices. I cannot, nor anybody, force people under every circumstance to do what you think is best. And on Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence said the White House is talking about disbanding the coronavirus task force, the one Fauci serves on, by early June, shifting even more responsibility to state and local leaders. Coming up, what we know about less common symptoms of the virus and one place on Earth where there is no social distancing because so far there's no coronavirus. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Tuesday, May 5th.

Every state, it seems, is doing things differently. And we keep coming back to that idea because over the next few weeks, from state to state, and even from county to county, we're going to learn a lot more about the good and the bad of those decisions. I wanted to update all of you on our current efforts. Like in California, where I live. Governor Gavin Newsom says he is going to allow retail businesses like clothing and sporting goods stores, bookshops and florists to reopen this week under certain conditions. Curbside pickup, social distancing. So it's incumbent upon the business leader to protect not only the customers, but their employees at the same time. Restaurants have been and will continue to stay closed to people who want to eat in,

at least in most places. We're not trying to go against anything. We just want to get back to the new norm, bring our economy back and lower our unemployment and get people back to working again. Crystal Martin is with the Downtown Business Association of Yuba City in Northern California, where county health officials have decided some restaurants can let people eat in. She talked to NPR's Nathan Rott. This is the story all over the country. How fast things open up and in what way?

Those decisions are being made by your neighbors, county officials, business leaders. It all starts with the PPE and adhering, making sure that the guests are adhering to the same testing standards that the staff is. In Texas, where movie theaters can open, Mitch Roberts told NPR's All Things Considered that a few theaters in his chain are open. They're taking everyone's temperature at the door, making sure staff wear masks and gloves. They've also set up a new ticketing system to comply with the state requirements that they operate at 25 percent capacity. What that allows us to do, if you select the ticket that's within 10 feet of another group, it tells you, hey, you can't sit here. You need to maintain physical distancing. As more states and businesses decide whether to open, more customers will decide whether to show up. A new Washington Post survey conducted with researchers at the University of Maryland found two-thirds of Americans say they'd be uncomfortable shopping at a retail clothing store, and nearly eight in ten people would be uncomfortable eating

at a sit-down restaurant. So as reopening moves forward, at different speeds in different places, we'll monitor this in a daily, real-time way. State officials will have to watch for where cases spike and then choose how to react if the virus starts to infect people at a dangerous rate. If it is, one of the criteria is a trigger to re-modify the changes. And so we just want folks to know we need to toggle back and forth here on the basis of what's happening in those communities in real time. Another big decision being made on the local level all across the country is how police officers should adjust to the new normal.

Here's NPR's Martin Koste. The most visible new assignment for police these days is enforcing social distancing. On Saturday, Chicago's new police superintendent, David Brown, warned that he'd be sending out his cops to break up house parties. As silly as that sounds, you could be arrested for having a party in this environment. A thousand officers were sent out on social distancing patrols in New York over the weekend, You could be arrested for having a party in this environment. A thousand officers were sent out on social distancing patrols in New York over the weekend, which mostly meant reminding people in public spaces to stay six feet apart.

There have been complaints in some cities that the rules are being enforced unevenly or unfairly, even as most cops will tell you that they'd rather not even be doing this kind of work. Tom Schaefer is a captain with the Omaha Police Department. Nobody became a cop so they could go to a bar and grill and say, you've got 11 people here, you've got to send one home. Sergeant Adam planning a patrols in San Francisco. He also writes books about police work. He says some aspects of that work are a little different now. Traffic stops, for instance.

Officers are trying to keep themselves and their families safe too, so if someone's doing a California roll through a stop sign, we might have been more inclined to stop them and either run their license or give them a ticket pre-corona than now. And when they do catch a suspect, if it's a non-violent crime, he says sometimes they'll just let that person go, especially if there's a contamination risk or the jail's crowded. He says they can always get an arrest warrant for that suspect later on. That can be hard to do, but these are interesting times we find ourselves in. But people should not count on getting let off.

In some circumstances, the authorities might want to make an example of them. Take the two women who allegedly robbed a drugstore in San Francisco in early April. John Bennett is the special agent in charge of the FBI office there. There were individuals that walked into a Walgreens and decided that they were going to announce to everybody that they had COVID and then proceed to cough on people as they removed items from the shelf and walked out the door. This drugstore caper is now a federal case.

The U.S. attorney is charging the women with interfering with interstate commerce. Bennett says the feds got involved to protect essential workers. Because these individuals were specifically using the threat of a virus in order to conduct criminal activity, that's where the game changes and that's where the FBI can get involved. Some people are hoping that this crisis will inspire a more forgiving attitude from police. At the same time, there are also some worries that social distancing by the police has created an opening for some violent criminals. In Omaha, Captain Schaefer says felony assaults and homicides went up, and in one neighborhood, shot spotter detectors picked up almost twice as many gunshots in March. I think the criminal element, I'd be remiss if they didn't notice the lack of cruisers out on traffic stops. And that's just one piece. But I think that that over time is kind of like, hey, we got a better chance to maybe go from point A to point B and not get pulled over.

But he says the department is now adjusting, beefing up its gang enforcement and getting officers enough PPEs and hand sanitizer so they can go back to what he calls more proactive policing. NPR's Martin Koste. You remember the first symptoms we all heard about? Fever, a cough, shortness of breath. And eventually that list expanded to include headaches, chills, and the loss of sense and smell and taste. And now, a rash on your toes. As more states and businesses open up, watching out for these symptoms is becoming more important. NPR health correspondent Maria Godoy has been reporting on all of this and has advice for when even a mild one should prompt you to seek testing.

She talked to Morning Edition host David Green. As more people around the world are getting infected, researchers are learning that symptoms can look really different in less severe cases. They don't always include cough or fever. Instead, sometimes symptoms can be milder, things like chills or headaches, which unfortunately are fairly common to lots of ailments. They're not specific to COVID-19. Well, that makes me wonder if the symptoms are common to other illnesses,

does that make it harder to know that you have COVID? Well, there's the idea of clustering, which is that some symptoms tend to occur together in people who are infected. So take headaches, for example. They're pretty common in general in adults. So I asked Dr. David Aronoff, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, when a headache should prompt someone to seek testing. And here's what he said.

That headache should be something that either is a headache that's new for them or that is sticking around a bit longer than they are used to or is associated with another symptom that may also be subtle, like fatigue. You know, in fact, research coming out of a UK project called the COVID Symptom Tracker suggests that headache is an important symptom that starts early, and headache commonly occurs in conjunction with other symptoms. So, for example, cough and fatigue in people who test positive for the virus. Okay, so this clustering of symptoms, it sounds like, can be really important. What are other examples of that? Yeah, so data from the COVID Symptom Tracker also suggests that in the frail elderly, so these are people who are over 70 who need help to get around, their symptoms tend to look different. And in this group of people, confusion and gastrointestinal issues like diarrhea, they occur more frequently together in people who later

test positive. So these are things that caregivers should watch out for in the elderly because they just might not seem like obvious symptoms of COVID-19. What about these really unusual symptoms that we're hearing about when, I mean, people losing their sense of smell? Well, so loss of sense of smell and of taste, because taste is really, really closely related to smell, that symptom has actually emerged as a really strong indicator of infection with COVID-19. There's research from both the US and the UK suggesting that six out of 10 people who report the symptom

end up testing positive for the virus. So if you are experiencing loss of smell, doctors I spoke with say that alone should prompt you to seek testing. But there's also good news, and that's that people who lose their sense of smell tend to have a milder course of the disease. There's also certain skin conditions that are emerging as signs of infection, like chilblains, which are like purple, pink, or red bumps or lesions in the toes, and they often are accompanied by swelling.

Wow. So it really is a disease that can present symptoms in all different ways for all different people who are suffering from it. Talking to NPR health correspondent Maria Godoy. Maria, thanks for all this. Thank you. Chris Marseille is stuck on a ship. It's not exactly a cruise. So looking around me from the ship's bridge, I can see the sea ice stretching away to the horizon in every direction. Chris is a researcher on the Mosaic Expedition, an international research project in the Arctic. And he set off back in January for what was supposed to be a three-month trip, but flights back to land were cancelled because of the pandemic.

It's been kind of surreal to hear of the restrictions on daily life for family and friends back home. And there have been plenty of conversations on board about how strange it will be to get back and be confronted with a completely different way of life than that which we left in January. Eventually, a new crew of researchers will arrive to relieve the current crew. No one on board has been sick. Still, when that new team shows up, they'll have to quarantine for two weeks. I never expected to come to the middle of the Arctic Ocean and have my daily life be less restricted than it would be at home. But in many ways, that's certainly the case at the moment. Marseille talked to Molly Samuel. She's a reporter at NPR member station WABE. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station and on NPR.org.

I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening to the show. We'll be back with more tomorrow.