Consider This from NPR - White House Task Force Briefing Is Back; Texas Emergency Rooms Are Filling Up

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

COVID-19 cases are at an all-time high in the U.S. And for the first time in almost two months, The White House Coronavirus Task Force had a televised briefing. In Texas on Thursday, 6,000 new cases of the coronavirus were reported. An ER doctor in Houston says beds are filling up and they are running out of places to send patients. Some states are closing down bars and restaurants, again, as COVID-19 cases continue to rise. But NPR's Scott Horsley explains that customer traffic has already been dropping for days. Even now, it can still be tough to get a coronavirus test especially, as NPR's Kirk Siegler reports, in tribal communities. Plus, with many movie theatres closed, the films topping the box office are a bit ... retro.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

Hey, just a quick thing before we get started. Very soon, the show is going to have a new name. Consider this. And we will be bringing you stories that are not just about the virus, because we know people are looking for news about other stuff, too. That said, the show is not going anywhere. We are still going to cover the pandemic. It is here, and we are here. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you. You can email us at coronavirusdaily at npr.org. Okay, here's the show. For the first time in almost two months, members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force went on TV. Well, good afternoon and to our fellow Americans out West, good morning.

And told a very different story than the numbers. One day after this country saw the highest number of new cases since the pandemic began, here's how Vice President Mike Pence described the situation. As we stand here today, all 50 states and territories across this country are opening up safely and responsibly. Pence said things are not as bad as they were two months ago, and that the huge spike in cases in Sunbelt states, especially among younger people, is likely not because of the reopening. Dr. Anthony Fauci didn't really want to go there.

I don't think there's time enough now all day to try and analyze and figure out the multifaceted elements that went into that. He said what's more important than what's to blame for the spread is how to stop it. You have an individual responsibility to yourself, but you have a societal responsibility. Because if you get infected, you are part, innocently or inadvertently, of propagating the dynamic process of a pandemic. Because the chances are that if you get infected, that you're going to infect someone else. Coming up, just because a place reopens,

that doesn't mean people will spend money there. And mass testing on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. This is Coronavirus Daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Friday, June 26th. We said this on the show yesterday, but it's worth saying it again. Tens of millions of people in this country have probably already had the coronavirus without even knowing it. That's according to officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Our best estimate right now is that for every case that was reported, there actually were 10 other infections. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, on a call with reporters Thursday, basically said the spread of this virus in the U.S. is likely much more widespread than we knew.

Texas recorded its highest number of cases in one day ever on Thursday, with more than 6,000 new cases. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott told people not to leave home unless they have to. And on Thursday, he issued an executive order restricting bars to delivery and takeout only. This after Texas had relaxed a lot of restrictions two months ago when stores, movie theaters and restaurants reopened. Now hospitals in Texas are getting ready. In all the major cities around the state, they have been ordered to suspend elective surgeries to make room for COVID patients. I've been working in the part where we have all of our suspected COVID patients and it's been getting busier and busier. That's Dr. Cedric Dark. He's an emergency room doctor affiliated with the Baylor College of

Medicine in Houston. And he told Morning Edition host Rachel Martin that outside of emergency rooms, there just aren't enough beds anymore. There's no space available. Literally, I've seen patients that have been in the ERs waiting for over 24 hours trying to find a place for them, a bed for them that has isolation capacity to handle COVID. And that just doesn't happen. The heads of four hospitals in the Texas Medical Center said on Thursday the system can handle the surge. Cedric Dark says he can't speak for an entire hospital system. But I can tell you what I see on the ground level with the patients that are in front of my eyes, and I know they're not moving out of the ER to the floors.

Which means if ERs are full of COVID patients, there might not be enough room for people who need to come to the ER for non-COVID-related emergencies. One of the things that my colleagues in New York had experienced was once you fill up your ICUs, once you fill up your floor beds, the next place and the only place for patients to be is in the emergency departments, and everything that needs to happen for them from life to death is going to happen in the ERs. Dr. Mark Boom, head of Houston Methodist Hospital Network, says while so far in Texas, the surge of people coming to hospitals is younger people who don't necessarily need intensive care. Don't get me wrong. This is a challenge and this will continue to be a challenge. And the bottom line is we can't change what's happening in the community directly. We need everybody to work together to change what's happening in the community

so that we can continue to handle that surge, care for people with COVID and without COVID. In Houston, the number of people in restaurants was halfway back to normal earlier this month. But then cases started to rise and the number of customers dropped a lot. Economists say this tracks with what they are seeing, which is when it comes to spending, it doesn't matter if businesses are allowed to reopen. If people don't feel safe, they're not going to spend money. And PR Scott Horsley starts with

Texas, which was one of the states that moved the most aggressively to open up in the spring. Houston bartender Blair Ault says at first it was nice to see all of her old customers. For sure, all the regulars came through and it was wonderful to see them. They were also the people who were most willing to follow all of the safety rules, like wearing masks and things that we put in place. On weekends in particular, though, Blair says a lot of bar hoppers aren't interested in wearing masks. As new infections and hospitalizations in the state have soared, the risk of going out seems less and less worth it. Even as a bartender, I do frequent bars,

and I have completely cut that out. And I know that just a lot of other people who are, I want to say, sensible are making that choice as well. Economists can now monitor those choices in something like real time by studying credit card data and online restaurant reservations. University of Chicago economist Austin Goolsbee used cell phone location data to track foot traffic at more than two million businesses around the country, he found wherever the coronavirus death toll increased, customers dialed back their shopping. And whether the government told them to stay home or not didn't make a lot of difference. The virus is the boss. This is not a thing to be decided by governors or mayors or anybody. People have to feel comfortable to go out. And if they don't, they're going to stay home. Goolsbee says the best and maybe only way to heal the U.S. economy is to get control of the pandemic. Otherwise, no matter how much politicians try to sell the

reopening, many consumers won't be buying. If we start getting another big cluster of cases that turn into a rise in deaths, we could be in for another significant economic hit. Gregory Dacco of Oxford Economics is already seeing that in places like Texas and Arizona. As infections in an area spiral up, people's interest in going out and spending money goes down. We're seeing people being more cautious about dining out, for instance. DACO's now watching closely to see what happens in New York and Massachusetts, which were hard hit early in the pandemic, but where caseloads have now dropped. This week, New York began to allow outdoor restaurant dining.

DACO says that experience will test whether a slower, more cautious reopening is possible without a new spike in infections. Those were places that saw increased mobility, but that so far have still been on the downward trajectory in terms of the health situation. In Texas, Blair Ault was scheduled to be back behind the bar tonight, and she was hoping for a quiet shift. I'm going to be honest, I'm hoping that people stay home, especially with the uptick in Texas, even though, yes, it affects my paycheck, but I would respect people trying to make more safe choices overall. Turns out Governor Abbott made the choice himself, ordering bars to close at noon Friday.

NPR's Scott Horsley. It can still be tough to get a coronavirus test, especially in tribal communities where people are at a disproportionate risk of getting COVID. Montana is now doing what they call mass surveillance testing events to gather data that health officials say is crucial to helping Native communities. NPR's Kirk Sigler went to see how the testing is working on the Flathead Reservation. Waiting in line outside the Salish and Kootenai Tribal College, 74-year-old Eric Van Manen is grateful to finally get a coronavirus test. A month ago, I just had a heart attack too, so old plus heart attack, so I'm at high risk. So it's good to come and get it done. Neither he nor his wife Francine are showing any symptoms,

so this is just for peace of mind. Yes, we just found out today that some person passed away that we know of and that that influx of their relatives from Washington came in. Some of the people brought it in from Washington. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes still have a shelter-in-place order, but the Flathead Reservation is carved up into a patchwork of non-native and native-owned property, making enforcement difficult. Hereby, Tribal Chairwoman Shelly Fientz says the number of infections here is low, but she expects that to change. You know, we're on the route between Yellowstone and Glacier.

Now that they've opened up, we're seeing a lot of out-of-staters. Almost two-thirds of the tribe's members are already considered vulnerable health-wise. COVID is just the latest crisis to expose health gaps between native and white populations in states like this. So we look at this mass testing event as giving us baseline data because we have no data to work off of. People were only getting tested if they were symptomatic. There are wide disparities in testing even within Indian country due to lack of infrastructure. Organizers were pleased with the turnout here, but in the wider community, Francine Van Manen thinks people still aren't taking the virus seriously.

I don't think they're taking their precautions as much as they should because they go out and they go shopping and then they go gambling and all of these places are exposed to other people. The Van Manens will wait up to seven days for their results, but they don't mind. They don't go out much because they think Montana reopened too soon. NPR's Kirk Sigler in Montana. Over the last few months, with most movie theaters closed, drive-ins have been dominating ticket sales. And since Hollywood isn't releasing anything new, the movies that are making the most money are the retro movies.

Last weekend, Jurassic Park, the original Steven Spielberg version, was at the top of the box office sales list for the first time since June 1993. We've got to get out of here. We've got to get out of here. Now. Now. Right now. In a close second was another Spielberg summer release. Jaws. We're going to need a bigger boat. Spielberg is having a pretty good summer. Also on this weekend's top ten list, E.T., The Goonies, and Back to the Future. Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

This baby hits a... Big thanks to Bob Mondello for keeping us up to date with the summer movies. Additional reporting in this episode was from Alison Aubrey and our colleagues at All Things Considered. For more on the coronavirus, you can stay up to date with all the news on your local public radio station. This show is produced by Emily Alfin Johnson, Gabriela Saldivia, Anne Lee, Lee Hale, and Brent Bachman,

and edited by Beth Donovan. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thank you for listening. Hey, I'm Sam Sanders, host of It's Been a Minute. There is a lot going on in the world. So on my show, my guest and I make sense of the news and culture through conversation. It feels like we're living in three movies at once. That's a good way to put it. It feels like a Mike Judge movie. It feels like a Spike Lee movie.

And it feels like a Michael Bay movie. Every Tuesday and Friday, listen and subscribe now to It's Been a Minute from NPR.