What A Day - An Epidemiologist Answers Covid-19 Questions (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

We’re joined once again by physician and former Detroit health commissioner Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to discuss Covid-19. We ask him how to evaluate the success of containment strategies, whether you can get coronavirus twice, and more.Congress is still hashing out the details on a the relief bill. Meanwhile, unemployment claims are skyrocketing. And in headlines: Senators sell off stock ahead of the pandemic, free cheesecake at The Factory, and Representative Tulsi Gabbard drops out of the race.

it's friday march 20th i'm akilah hughes and i'm gideon resnick and this is what a day coming to you on what was supposed to be a big day at the box office for pixar's onward yeah more like non-word pixar annihilated dragged Annihilated. Dragged. On today's show, an interview with our resident health and policy expert, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Then some headlines. But first, we'll kick it off with the latest with a quick word from an iconic pop star. That was JoJo with a very good remix of a middle school and bar mitzvah classic. Look up the whole thing.

It is quite an educational bop. Yes, we love JoJo. Here we stand. All righty, let's check in with the feds. So the State Department has raised the travel advisory to its highest level, and that's a four. They're advising Americans to refrain from traveling abroad at all, and to, if they can, return back to America

if they're currently abroad. I'm not Sherlock Holmes, but my powers of deduction are telling me that with all the borders being closed in succession rapidly, we should probably just listen to this advice. Congress is still working on that relief bill. Not going to go into too many details because things are so fluid, but the upshot is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced another package on Thursday that some Democrats said they were concerned could be not friendly enough to workers. To me, unsurprising. Maybe next week, you know, they can all come together and try to save us. Love all this bureaucracy in the midst of a pandemic. Trump is still speaking every day.

Anything worthwhile that he had to say on Thursday? Okay, so Donald Trump's daily pressers are essentially a propaganda hour, seemingly his solution to no longer holding all those rallies he was doing. And they're filled with medical misinformation, racism, and stuff that he says is happening, but it isn't actually happening. So take, for example, those military hospital ships that he said were going to be deployed off the coast of New York. Yeah, that's not happening for a few weeks, according to the Pentagon. The Navy is sending two ships to Seattle, but they won't be there for another five to ten days. And minor detail, they're not going to be treating people infected with COVID-19. It's going to be a place to take other patients because, I don't know, maybe the Pentagon saw that putting sick people on a cruise with healthy people didn't really work out that well the last few times.

Also, the Defense Production Act ain't happening, at least not yet and for a while. That's the act that allows the government to make factories boost production of critical supplies. Trump invoked it in a speech earlier this week, but then he said he doesn't plan to use it yet because it's only for a, quote, worst case scenario. Doesn't make sense considering the mass shortages happening nationwide at hospitals and treatment centers right now. Feels like a worst case scenario to me. In fact, we know now that the 500 million N95 respirator masks the president said the government ordered could take up to 18 months to be delivered. It's like me telling you I ordered Lysol wipes on Amazon today. Like, yeah, maybe I did, but they're not coming for a long, long, long, long, long ass time.

You know, the government is really just in great hands. Well, the economy has been a roller coaster lately, but mostly the parts where it's just the big scary drop. What's the latest on that? All right. So let's take a break from the stock market just for a sec, because now we have our first actual data on how this is impacting people's jobs. Yesterday, the Labor Department reported that jobless claims went up by 70,000 last week. And for us consumers, complaints of price gouging are also up. According to a survey from the Associated Press, there have been over 5,000 complaints so far, though they note this is most likely an undercount. So yeah, we being scammed. But in personal finance news, beware the Ides of July because that's the new

income tax deadline for the IRS. If April 15th was driving you nuts, you now have an extra 90 days to prepare. So that is one little bit of good news. I'm certainly going to use all those 90 days and not just the day before. We've gone through what's been happening stateside, but what else is new on the international front? All right. So internationally, the virus is still peaking in Europe. Italy's death toll jumped up to a total of 3,400. That surpasses China's toll. It's really devastating. And we're all hoping that things start to turn around there. They're taking a lot of measures to try to mitigate it. So hopefully, some good stuff can happen there. In China, according to Chinese state media, there were no new local transmissions reported yesterday.

And that was the first day without new cases. So remember, these numbers are still kind of hard to fully verify worldwide. So all I can say is that's what's being reported. And we do really hope it's accurate. Right. We know that all of us are also feeling the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in our everyday lives. And it's important to take care of each other and the most vulnerable people and communities, plus the people that are working on the front lines of this. We've come up with an easy way

for you to go and do that through our Coronavirus Relief Fund. If you can go to crooked.com slash coronavirus, donations will support groups like Feeding America, Meals on Wheels, No Kid Hungry, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Workers Community Foundation, The U.S. now has over 13,000 confirmed cases and over 100 deaths. On Wednesday, the CDC released its first round of data on who is getting sick from coronavirus in the United States. And here are some top lines. Nearly 40% of people needed to be hospitalized were ages 20 to 54. That gives you some sense of how prevalent this is among young people and middle-aged people and how serious it can be, even for those who are not elderly. As in other countries, though, older patients have the

greatest likelihood of dying, and only 5% of cases were diagnosed in people 19 and younger. Yeah, we're still learning more about this novel coronavirus, and guidance from health officials is changing every day. So every week, we're going to try to check in with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He's a physician, an going to try to check in with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He's a physician, an epidemiologist, and former city health commissioner. Abdul, thank you for taking the time. Well, thank you all for having me. I, you know, like many of us, have some time these days. So excited to spend it with you. Right. It's either us or the various streaming platforms. We hope we're as enjoyable as those can possibly be.

Oh, so much better. To kick us off here, I want to start by asking, a lot of these questions that we have were from people that we asked yesterday, friends and then people online as well. But the first question that we want to pose is, when will we know how well containment strategies that are being put into place now are actually working? Well, the incubation period for this disease, and let me just explain what an incubation period is. It's the time between when you're exposed to the virus and the last possible moment that you could be sick from it. It's about two weeks. And so we're always working about two weeks in hindsight. So what we do today will

influence what happens two weeks from now and vice versa. And so, you know, we know how successful what we did two weeks ago is based on what's happening today. I encourage people to take a look at a number that you can easily calculate called the doubling time, which is the time it takes for the number of cases to double. And you can do this by just looking at any COVID tracker website. There's a bunch of them. Johns Hopkins has a really good one. And it'll tell you how many cases there are in a given, there have been. And you can just look at how many days until the number of cases double. And so far, the doubling time has been between three and four days. What we're looking for is that doubling time to increase, right? You want it to double more slowly and more slowly still until it's no longer doubling.

And so that's all, you know, that all tells us, though, how successful we were two weeks ago. And so, you know, when you've got, you know, beach bros in Florida hanging out on the beach, they're hurting all of us, right? Because they're delaying our ability to fully socially distance, mitigate the spread of disease and increase that doubling time. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, spring break is not even that fun, to be honest. I don't look back fondly on any of my spring breaks, so I don't know what they're doing. You know, what's the point? I mean, I watch the show, right? Like you watch it on MTV. It

doesn't look like anyone's having fun. It's all a bunch of drama. It's a lot of people standing around. Yeah. It's pretty sad. Well, I have a question personally, but lots of other people have also asked, is it safe to eat produce? Like should all food be cooked from now on? Is takeout okay? Should I be like very cautious when I'm ordering in or like eating salad? So produce is okay. But just make sure you wash it just like you normally would. And, you know, just like you wash your hands to make sure that, you know, anything that you put from your hands into your mouth doesn't include COVID on it or any bacteria really

or virus. You wash your produce. I might wash it just a little bit more vigorously. Um, and, uh, and, and, and then go from there. Um, when it comes to carry out, I think the, the best advice is to, to just call the restaurant and ask a, um, you know, what particular precautions are you taking, uh, to protect your customers? And then B, um, do you have a good paid sick leave policy? Cause you really don't want the person cooking the meal in the kitchen to have to have come because there is no paid sick leave and, you know, potentially make you sick because they're in effect being

forced to work. And so, you know, this is a moment, I think, to just hold those businesses accountable. But, you know, if they are being thoughtful and taking extra precautions and, you know, their workers aren't sick who are preparing the food, I do think it's okay. We may get to a point where that changes, but for now, I do think it's okay, personally. Another question that we have, what process is recommended for returning to normal life once we are all collectively past the peak of this. And that would be at a point, I guess, to mitigate the risk of new outbreaks. A federal report says there's a possibility that we could see multiple waves of outbreaks and lockdowns. How long does this also kind of conceivably go on? Yeah, Gideon, you're asking a really important question right now.

The reality is we don't know, but let me explain why the report postulates that we might go for up to 18 months. And that's because as we socially distance right now, what we're doing this for is to mitigate the spread of the disease. And as the number of cases starts to fall, we may think that we're out of the woods. The problem, though, is that when we go back to normal life, if there are still a large proportion of people who are susceptible, which there will be if we're successful, then the number of cases can start to go up again. And so their argument is that we may need to go through several cycles of mitigation until we have a vaccine. Because, of course, what a vaccine does is it makes people immune to the virus, which stops it from spreading. And we just kicked off the first vaccine trial, which will last for 14 months.

It's a phase one trial. right, then you've got another four months for phase two and phase three, which means at the earliest possible point, we would get to 18 months without having to, you know, without having to mitigate after that. And so we could be in this for a while. I'll just say that there is nothing more resilient in the world than humanity. It's the reason that, you know, we've cultivated the earth sometimes in great ways and oftentimes in not so great ways. But we're extremely resilient. And I know that for a lot of us, you know, it's only been two weeks, a month since we started to really lock it down. And so, you know, you look at this and be like, well, I just want to go back to where I was then, rather than just say, well, look, you know, we're going to be in this new reality for a while.

And the beautiful things in life, the things that make us happy, the things that remind us what joy and beauty are, those aren't gone. They just will come in different ways. And I think we need to embrace those things and be ready to do what it takes to protect all of us in the context of this pandemic. One of our listeners also asked us to ask you, if someone does get COVID-19, are they then immune? And once they recover, could they go back to work and then perhaps help others who aren't immune at that stage? Usually with these diseases, once your body knows how to beat it, it knows how to beat it. And so you have immunity after you've been infected. We're not certain that that's the case right now.

There's no reason not to believe that it is, but we're just not certain, right? We haven't, we don't have the research yet just because this is so young. But what we presume is that it will likely be the case that you're immune. And if, you know, you did get COVID-19 and then are out of the woods, that you could go back to, you know, daily life because you can't be a carrier in your body. In theory, you can have it on your hands and pass it on that way. That being said, and I can imagine somebody getting smart and being like, well, I'll just get the disease early and then I'll be cool. I'll be good. That's just not a logical way of

working in the world because you don't know how serious your case is going to be. You also don't know how many people you might infect. And in the process where we all are right now of trying to flatten the curve and mitigate the spread, all of us have it in our best interest to protect ourselves and protect each other through protecting ourselves. So lots of people are trying to make plans right now. The United States issued a warning to people that international travel might be cut off soon for a while. Here's an example of one person's situation. Their 70 plus parents and in-laws were abroad in Australia and the US Virgin Islands, I believe, respectively, when the virus struck. Now they want to come back to the New York City metro area.

Some have serious underlying conditions. Should they risk coming home at this point? The risk of contracting the disease at baseline just increases every day. There's more disease, right? And we talked about that doubling time. The more there are people out there with the disease, the higher the risk. So tomorrow is riskier than today for the foreseeable future. On top of that, the places that are the riskiest are the places where there are a lot of people constantly moving and touching things. And so if there is a safe alternative to traveling right now, I would hunker down in that safe alternative. But for a lot of folks, they just need to travel and they need to get back to their

lives for reasons. And in that case, it's a cost benefit analysis that, you know, folks can uniquely do. But I just think that the risk of this is real. And it's even worse for folks in that risk zone who are either older, certainly above 60, and or have chronic illnesses. And in that respect, I would be really looking for an opportunity to just bunker down in place, however frustrating and annoying that is, until more of this clears up and you know more. At the same time, we very well might be closing borders down in time. And so if there's a pressing need to come and you feel like, you know, I can bunker down in place for two weeks, but not longer than that, coming earlier is better than waiting until later. And so if the decision at any point in the next two months to

four months is I have to be back, then leaving today is the right thing to do. But at the same time, I don't want to underplay the risk of traveling through airports. I've made several decisions not to in the course of work requests to travel simply because it is dangerous and those are the highest risk zones. And if you're a high risk person, putting those two things together isn't the best. You can hear more from Abdul on his podcast called America Dissected, where he's just launched a second season focused entirely on the coronavirus and the response. Today's episode explains herd immunity and why it may not be the way out of this crisis. So definitely check that out. What it do, WOD Squad? We've made it to the weekend in a world that is now mostly weekend for some.

We are feeling easy like Sunday morning and checking in to stay sane. So Gideon, have you seen anything that made you smile today? I saw a video that was a take on that Celebrity Imagine singing montage. Oh, God. Yeah. Wow. That was actually an actual lol. And then us fucking around with the Zoom backgrounds has been really rewarding as well.

Just the little things. Yeah, we've been telecommuting on Zoom for our listeners at home. Yes, and doing like 1990s music video backgrounds for it. Just a lot of fun to be had here. But there's never been more time to read than now. Akilah, do you have any good book recs for people? I do. So I've been behind, admittedly, on reading. But this break has been a really good time to catch up on some of my friends' books. So check out The Ones We've

Been Waiting For. That's by Charlotte Alter. And it's about how millennials are going to save the world, which I believe will happen. And a book by Kevin Nguyen, and it's called New Waves. It's a beautiful blue cover. I'll probably post it to my Instagram, but really enjoying it. It's a novel, and he's also just a great journalist, so great writing, loving it. And yeah, this was Life During Lockdown. It looks like this name is sticking, but who knows?

Maybe next week I'll want to change it up. We're very fluid here about how we react to the coronavirus and our check-ins. But big ups to the home team and also to all those champions still going into work in these weirdo times. Call a friend or a family member this weekend and feel free to tell us all about it. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. citizens of the Reich were taken to jail along with their firearms and pro-Nazi propaganda. Great. The men who were arrested were part of the first group associated with citizens of the Reich to be banned by the government.

Germany has recently been cracking down on racist domestic extremism. And just last week, authorities put the far-right political party AFD under formal surveillance. A spokesperson from the government commented that the fight against racism and extremism would not stop even under the current global health emergency. That's what's up. We got to attack those racists all the time, not just during times of crisis. All right. Representative and surfer Tulsi Gabbard officially suspended her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday.

On her way out, she announced her endorsement for former Vice President Joe Biden, which surprised some people considering that she endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016. Aloha to that lady. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, sold off between $580,000 and $1.56 million in stocks at the same time he was telling the public that the government was prepared to combat coronavirus. My God. He's a dick. What a dick. That's according to a report from ProPublica, which also pointed out that Burr was one of just three senators who voted against a 2012 bill barring lawmakers from using non-public info for insider trading. Way to follow through on that vote, Mr. Burr. Yeah, Mr. Burr, history has its eyes on you. Lin-Manuel taught me.

I wish I understood the reference. Burr attended an exclusive luncheon on February 27th where he told members of the Capitol Hill Club about the extent to which COVID-19 was going to decimate the economy in terms that were far more stark than anything he'd said publicly. Burr's fellow Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler sold between $1.3 million and $3.1 million in stocks after a private Senate briefing on coronavirus in late January. Sounds like a trend. With a net worth of $500 million, she is the wealthiest member of Congress. Okay. While the government figures out its relief program for coronavirus, Cheesecake Factory is stepping in with their own solution. From now until April 16th, they'll give you a free slice of cheesecake when you make your order online. coronavirus, Cheesecake Factory is stepping in with their own solution. From now until April 16th, they'll give you a free slice of cheesecake when you make your order online. Still waiting on Trump to aid in this effort by ordering all American factories to an emergency pivot to cheesecake. You do have to spend $30 to qualify, which luckily is the price of one Cheesecake Factory crouton

soaked in Thousand Island dressing. Many American restaurant chains are amping up their delivery options and closing their dining rooms to stay safe during the pandemic. Good for you all. Fight the good fight. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, sign our change.org petition to release Onward in the next five hours and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just number-shaped candles on birthday cakes like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Cricut.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And enjoy the free cheesecake.

Eating cheesecake in unison Just like prom I love it What a day is a product of Crooked Media It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis Sonia Tun is our assistant producer Our head writer is John Milstein And our senior producer is Katie Long Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka