What A Day - BCC The CDC

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

We talk to The Atlantic’s Ed Yong about how public health workers and officials are fighting the pandemic, and what we're now learning about the potential long-lasting effects of Covid-19.The Trump administration is now asking hospitals to send data on Covid-19 patients directly to them and not the CDC. And in headlines: Joe Biden announces new climate change proposal, Trump administration backs off plan to revoke some visas from international students, and Jair Bolsonaro gets pecked by rhea.

It's Wednesday, July 15th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, wishing you a happy summer tax day. Yeah. And if you forgot, that's fair. We don't usually do it this time. There are some other things going on, too. It's okay. On today's show, we talk to science journalist Ed Yong about the pandemic, then some headlines. All right. So yesterday we talked about how the White House has been, you know, seeking to publicly undermine Dr. Anthony Fauci. You know, they got op-eds, bad political cartoons, we're living in the dumbest timeline. Meanwhile, Fauci continues to serve on the coronavirus task

force and has continued to attend meetings at the White House, including one on Monday in the West Wing with Trump's chief of staff. Yeah. And on Tuesday, there was new reporting that the Trump administration is now asking hospitals to send data on COVID-19 patients directly to them at the health department and not the CDC, the country's leading infectious diseases agency, raising some concerns that there could be efforts to misuse the information for political purposes or withhold it. So we'll likely get into that a little bit more later down the road. But these are just two examples in the past two days that fit into a bigger story about the United States' failure to deal with the pandemic and the pressures facing public health officials

at every level who are working to fight it, now several months in with budgets and departments that were under-resourced to begin with. It's a topic that Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic, has been reporting on as well. We talked to Ed back in April about the virus, so we thought it would be a good time to check in with him again. His latest story is called The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay. Ed, thank you so much for coming back to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Absolutely. Okay, so I want to start with your most recent reporting that is about burnout among public health officials. We talked to a couple of the people you spoke to for this story, Dr. Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist in Arizona,

and Nicolette Louis-Saint, who runs a nonprofit called Healthcare Ready that makes sure communities have good access to medical supplies. Here's a little bit of what they said. You know, somebody said recently to me, oh, you must just be loving this. And it's like, well, it's fascinating to get to experience what you've been training and educated on for most of your life. But at the same time, it's absolutely horrific to watch and to work in. And nobody trains you for that. Nobody trains you and tells you how horrible it's going to be working in it, living in it, seeing people around you die and be so severely impacted by this. People are getting demoralized.

And some of it is when you are dealing with the evidence every day and you are seeing the evidence, and it seems so obvious to you that these are the things that we all need to do. It is hurtful even to think that you are working this hard and sacrificing so much of yourself and pouring so much of yourself into something. And there's evidence. It's not that you're doing it and you're saying like, just trust me, there's evidence and people are still not doing it. And it's as if your sacrifice is unnoticed and unappreciated. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. So what made you want to actually seek this out and report on this particular aspect of the pandemic? So I'm always interested in how difficult times affect the people who are trying to address those times. So I've got a history of writing about, you know,

the mental health of people who work on, say, coral reefs or who try and avert animal extinctions. And so when this pandemic happened, one really obvious question to me was, how are the people who are on the front lines of it coping? And I think that we've heard a lot about the conditions that doctors and nurses, you know, healthcare workers in hospitals have faced. But there's also this other group of people who work in public health, people who are tasked with making sure

that viruses don't spread among entire communities, safeguarding the health of entire populations, who have been working non-stop since the start of this pandemic. They have been my sources for many stories. And they're very used now to sharing their expertise, but much less used to talking about themselves. And I wanted to find out how they're handling it. And, you know, the answer is, as we've heard, not well, you know, all of them, to be clear, every person I've spoken to has been very, very adamant that they have it less bad than healthcare workers on the front lines than a lot of people who've lost their jobs, who've lost their loved ones. But that doesn't change the fact that a lot of them are also struggling, that they're

finding this massive emotional and mental burden that seems to have no sign of letting up. Right. I also noticed that, you know, you spoke with a lot of women working in public health for your story. And so when you were talking to them, you know, you found some extra challenges that they are facing. What were some of those, if you could speak on that? Yeah. So I think they shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. You know, people in public health in general are facing a lot of pushback because this pandemic, like so much else in America, has become so politically polarized. But women in this field in particular and women of color on top of that are facing this kind of vitriol to an extreme degree. So they are facing harassment, a lot of them are facing threats, their character, their expertise is being called into question in a way that it

simply wouldn't be if they were men. You know, a lot of them used to just chat with their own colleagues in their own fields, and now they have massive followings on Twitter. They're on the news all the time. And that service of communicating, of sharing your expertise is not rewarded in the world of academia. It's not rewarded in the world of academia. It's not rewarded in the sciences by universities. And instead of rewarding it, a lot of these folks are in fact getting threatened,

getting harassed for it. You know, is that the type of situation that we want to leave for the people who are actually trying to help us all right now? I hope not. Right. It's like, you know, people are trying to do their best to help us all right now? I hope not. Right. It's like we were, you know, people are trying to do their best to help in any way. And they're still being pushed back. I'm like,

just take the help. Why are you so averse to being helped? Yeah. I said to a friend recently, you know, these folks are, they already feel like they're shouting into the void and the void is sending them horrible messages in their DMs. The void shouts back. The void is shouting back and the void is making no sense. Yeah. Yeah. We don't like the void. But to the point of the pandemic more broadly, last time we spoke at the end of April, some states were just starting to

lift restrictions. You said that we could end up in a situation not all that different from where we actually were in February and March because we hadn't adequately addressed testing and tracing and hospital capacity issues. And now that we're in July, wouldn't you know it, we're facing the pandemic the way that it currently is right now. So would you say that that's exactly what is happening? Yeah, I think so. I think the truly tragic thing about what is happening now is that it was both preventable and predictable. And it was clear that if the country rushed to reopen too early, and if it went too far with reopening, that it would create conditions in which the virus, which had not been suppressed, would rage out of control. And, you know, like we've already heard, there's no, you know, there's no valor or comfort in being right about this. Dr. LeSant said this to me when I interviewed her, that preparedness is actually a horrible

thing to think about because you're constantly imagining all the worst possible outcomes, which just kind of sucks. That's an awful headspace to be living in for a long time. And it's even worse when your predictions then turn out to be right. Because now, because now, people like her are in a position where she's looking at what's going on, imagining the worst outcomes for two, three, four months down the line. And really thinking, maybe I'm also going to be right about that, which is, again, really horrible. That is so draining. Right. One last question for you. And it's sort of getting at this point of like, are we looking at data points or are we looking at something that is a trend or something that could be constituted as kind

of a fact about this in the future? So there are thousands of people who say that they have long term COVID symptoms. We're talking 60 and 90 day illnesses, which you've written about as well. Do you think that we have a lot more to learn about the longer term effects of this disease? Yeah, absolutely. That feels pretty unquestionable to me. The exact number of these long haulers who've had symptoms for going on months now, I think is still unknown.

I'm absolutely confident that it's definitely in the thousands. It's almost certainly in the tens of thousands, just by the sheer numbers of people in the various support groups who are not getting help. Is it higher than that? Is it the hundreds of thousands? I don't know. That actually wouldn't surprise me. But it feels like this is a massive question that we still aren't truly grappling

with. You know, the fact that I can't tell you how many there are is an issue. The fact that I'm not even sure whether there are the kinds of rigorous surveys that would give you a number is an issue. And in the meantime, a lot of these folks are really still suffering. And I think this is a huge and still largely untold story about the pandemic. You know, I think that if, I think a lot of people who fancy themselves invincible, because they are young might think differently about their choices, if they knew that other young previously fit previously healthy people are looking at medium to long term disability, because of this disease. And even even if they get the so called mild version of the disease, that doesn't end up with them hooked up to a ventilator.

There are more studies coming out about some of the long-term consequences. They tend, as far as I'm aware, to focus on people who've been in hospital and then they've been discharged and sort of following that bump in the long term. That's great. We absolutely need that information.

My point is that there are a ton of people who have never been admitted to hospital who are also going through the same things and whose lives have been completely upturned and destroyed by this virus. And, you know, I know they exist. I have tried to tell their stories. I don't know how many they are.

And I don't know why they, rather than anyone else, is going through this. And I don't know if they, rather than anyone else, is going through this. And I don't know if people are trying to find out is probably the thing that worries me most. Absolutely. Well, Ed, thank you so much again for taking the time today. And thank you for helping us through the latest on what we know and what we still do not know about all this. Thanks for talking to me. I always appreciate it. That was Ed Young, science reporter at The Atlantic.

Definitely check out his latest story on public health experts, along with the rest of his reporting. It's Wednesday, WOD Squad. And for today's Temp Check, we're talking about a new White House-backed campaign with some helpful and not at all meaningless advice for 18 million out-of-work Americans. It's called Find Something New. The face of the campaign is Ivanka Trump, who, as we know, built herself up from nothing. And it's supposed to raise awareness about career training programs that serve as an alternative to two or four years of college. So now, Giddy, this rollout totally sucked. Why was it so infuriating?

Yeah, I mean, they had like a couple examples that were sort of like these nice success stories of people that like, you know, did something else and were able to do it. And I think that's great. And I'm very, very happy that people are employed and having those opportunities to have jobs and do things. But yeah, I mean, the notion that, you know, you can paper over a massive and worsening problem by saying, hey, maybe, you know, go out there and be an entrepreneur and, you know, really try to pull your bootstraps up and get that new job it's just utterly whatever money you have left from

that stimulus check you can try to be an upstart fucking entrepreneur that is wild yeah yeah it seems like completely missing the point entirely but you know if Ivanka Trump wants to go to a two-year vocational college

or something like that, like, God bless her, like, go right ahead. You know, wouldn't hurt me. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a campaign for her to just go do it and be quiet. Like, she could go get really good at welding, like you said. But it just seems like it misses the reason why none of us have jobs. Like, what? The jobs are, they didn't just leave, and we're not looking for something else. Like, no one's telling basketball players to go get, to go try something new.

They're coming up with solutions for them. So it's just, it's very stupid. Hey, well, it felt good to get that out. And just like that, our tips have been checked. Stay safe. We'll check in with you all again tomorrow. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Let's wrap up with some headlines. The goal is to have carbon pollution-free power plants by 2035 and to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. So these goals were recommendations from a joint task force created

by Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders to help bridge the gap between progressives and moderates within the party. Varshini Prakash, a member of that task force and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, said the proposal addressed many of her group's past criticisms of Biden's previous climate change plans. The new proposal is the second step of Biden's economic agenda that he's calling Build Back Better. If it sounded less like Be Best, I would not be mad. Britain announced yesterday that it will ban Chinese technology giant Huawei from its new 5G network. Up until now, Huawei has been the country's largest provider of wireless towers and masts. Relations between the UK and China have been rocky since China imposed a controversial national security law in Hong Kong. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered a pass to citizenship to Hong Kong residents, which

China wasn't happy about. The new ban also calls for the removal of existing Huawei equipment in the UK, which will add major costs and would significantly slow down the rollout of 5G networks in the country. The Trump administration will not push to require international college students to take in-person classes if they want to keep their visas in a major reversal of a policy it proposed earlier this month. ICE thought students shouldn't be in the country if their classes were all online. They just didn't think the college experience would be complete if you couldn't catch COVID from your QTA. ICE's move to abandon the policy came after it was hit with a lawsuit from Harvard and MIT, which claimed the policy was illegal and would disrupt the lives and academic pursuits of their

international students. Harvard and MIT were backed up by hundreds of universities, plus 20 state attorneys general who also challenged the guidance in court. The federal government will now revert to a more flexible policy from March. Hit me up if anyone wants to meet on the quad for a socially distanced hacky sack. It's really hard and honestly not fun. Accurate. The so-called Trump of the tropics, a.k.a. the Brazil nut Jair Bolsonaro, has COVID-19 and is extremely bored after his personal quarantine day seven. President Bolsonaro's home country of Brazil has the second largest outbreak in the world,

undoubtedly helped along by his own COVID denialism. Now, the effects of the pandemic seem to have hit home, with Bolsonaro describing his own self-quarantine as, quote, horrible, and as something he, quote, can't stand. If nearly 2 million sick Brazilians can't convince him that this is serious, maybe 70 straight hours in the same free t-shirt from a radio station will. To make matters worse for Bolsonaro, when he took a much-needed walk outside his home, one of the large birds that lives on the grounds pecked him. It was a rhea, which is similar to an ostrich, and it knew exactly what it was doing. Flightless birds want us to stay inside. Another thing we can learn from them is if you forget your mask, you can bury your own head underground. Sounds good to me. And those are the headlines.

Before we go, we've got an update on Crooked's Adopt-A-State program. If you don't know, Adopt-A-State is a way to protect and get out the vote in battleground states this fall. I adopted Florida last week. The first call to action emails went out and it looks like Team Florida raised over $40,000 to register voters virtually. So it does kind of look like my team is the best team. As a member of Team Wisconsin, we cannot let this stand, and we won't. Cricket will be sending new calls to action every week via email, so keep checking your email and getting those actions done. And if you haven't already signed up, it's not too late.

Go to votesaveamerica.com slash adopt to join. That's all too late. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash adopt to join. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave us a review. Don't peck us if you're an emu or a rea and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just articles in Brazilian newspapers about rea attacks like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe.

I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And remember to build back better. But. What a day is a Crooked Media production. 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. Thank you.