What A Day - COVID By The Numbers

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

The FDA’s advisory panel voted to approve emergency authorization of the Pfizer-BionNTech coronavirus vaccine. Once it’s authorized, which could be any day now, an initial shipment of about 6.4 million doses is expected to be sent across the country. The state of the pandemic in the United States is extremely dire, with this week bringing a new record in single day fatalities, and a record number of people hospitalized across the country. One of the main sources of reliable data throughout the pandemic has been the Covid Tracking Project. We spoke to Alexis Madrigal, one of its co-founders, about the current numbers, how we measure where we’re at, and where we go from here.Plus, we’re joined by writer and comedian Tien Tran for headlines: Amazon’s new invasive fitness tracker, MPD defunds the police, and a DMT study in England.Show Links:https://covidtracking.com/https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alexis-madrigal/ Listen to Tien Tran on Hysteria and find her on Instagram:https://crooked.com/podcast-series/hysteria/https://www.instagram.com/hanktina/?hl=en

It's Friday, December 11th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, where we are requesting that Disney Plus puts Jabba in all 10 of its new Star Wars shows. Yeah, but I don't want to stop there. I want him also to be in all of the new Pixar features and all of the basic shows on pretty much every other streaming platform. Yeah, Jabba should be the main character and showrunner of everything on HBO Max. Anything that I see that doesn't have Jabba in it in the next couple of years, I'm going to cry.

On today's show, a conversation with Alexis Madrigal, who co-runs the COVID tracking project, then some headlines. But first, the latest. Yesterday, the FDA's vaccine advisory panel voted 17 to 4 to approve emergency authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. It is a big, big step and means that the FDA is almost certainly going to authorize it imminently. From there, an initial shipment of about 6.4 million doses is expected to be sent out across the country. Half will be the first doses and the other half will cover the second dose for the same individuals three weeks later. The Pfizer trial will reportedly continue and there will be more observations for safety

concerns. Pfizer said that they plan to apply for full approval in April after six months of safety data has been collected. At this point, emergency authorization would clear the way for at-risk individuals like healthcare workers and nursing home residents to begin getting shots. Also, next week, the FDA will review Moderna's vaccine data. Yeah, I hope we go two for two. And this is coming as we face an increasingly drastic situation in the United States. This week brought the new single-day record in COVID fatalities exceeding 3,000 people. There is continuing growth in cases

and hospital capacity is a major issue in many parts of the United States, with more than 100,000 people hospitalized across the country as we speak. So the expectation is that this will only get far worse as we see the full brunt of holiday gatherings. One of the main sources of reliable data throughout the pandemic has been the COVID tracking project. We have referenced it over and over on the show, and you've probably seen it a zillion other times in news stories. It's a daily dashboard of COVID data created by journalists at The Atlantic in the absence of good accessible federal numbers. Back in March, when it launched, we spoke to Alexis Madrigal, one of the co-founders. And now that we're at the deadliest point we've seen in all the pandemic, we wanted to catch up

with him again to talk about the current numbers, how we measure where we are at, and where we go from here. Here's that conversation. Alexis, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so, you know, there are so many different metrics to keep track of. At first, it was how much we were testing. Then there was all of the testing positivity rate stuff. Then daily cases.

Now hospitalization numbers are the big numbers to pay attention to. So what numbers do you keep your eyes on that, you know, can really tell us how we're doing? Yeah, I mean, we really do. We watch the hospitalization numbers really closely. I think, though, more than you would think, cases really do matter. Like, I think that we wanted at different times of pandemic to want to say really complicated things about like, well, maybe like the age brackets and the blah, blah, blah. But in the bulk, a lot of cases means a lot of deaths. And one of the things that has really come across clearly in like, say since July,

is that the relationship between cases and deaths has been pretty steady. Basically, you take a case number and you multiply it between one and a half been pretty steady. Basically, you take a case number and you multiply it between one and a half and 2%, and that's how many people are going to die. And it may be on the low end, it may be on the high end, but it's been in that bracket since July. And I think that is something that people haven't really gotten gotten yet in part because there's been so many different Stories about how much treatments have improved and you know, you see individual people, you know be fine um, and all that is true treatments have improved and you know,

95% of the people who get it 98 and a half percent of people who get are going to be fine and all that stuff, right? But it's still just like, man, it's a lot of people dying. Yeah. And one more on this sort of topic of, you know, treatments that we were talking about and kind of increased medical knowledge at this stage in the pandemic.

How has that impacted fatalities overall? You're talking about sort of that rough modeling that you could do based on cases. And does that show up when you're sort of crunching all this in the data? Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing is, like, if you look at spring, and then you look at summer and beyond, like spring was a lot worse, like you didn't want to get COVID in the spring. And just, you know, of the people that went into hospitals, like just fewer of them came out, and the death rates are much higher, and we couldn't confirm the cases. And there were, you know, of the people that went into hospitals, like just fewer of them came out and the death rates are much higher and we couldn't confirm the cases. And there were, you know, too many people were being put on ventilators and there's a whole series of things. And, you know,

doctors have been working hard. Nurses have been working hard, just people to understand what to do. The problem is just like the improvements really like flattened after that. And I think the thing that's most worrisome right now, this guy named Ashish Jha, who's the Dean of Brown's Public Health School, and even looking at the numbers, looking at our current hospitalization numbers and saying like, you know, of the number of cases, fewer people are now being hospitalized than in the past. And his hypothesis that is backed up by a lot of like reporting and anecdotes is that hospitals are tightening their admission criteria. So someone who's, who is a certain amount sick in October would have been admitted into the hospital,

that same person with the same vital signs, the same, everything is now being sent home. Obviously, if you're, if you're, you know, on your deathbed with COVID, they're going to admit you, but it's those cases that are kind of on the edge where some people are going to be sent home, and that is worse care. There's no way around it. So what's really wild, the upshot of that is even with the enormously high hospitalization numbers we have, you know, over 105,000 people in the hospital, there really should be more. Wow, that's a really good point. Well, I mean, we're all moving towards vaccinations, which is exciting. But are you planning at all to capture some of the data about how many people are getting vaccinated?

Do you have any sense of how or whether you'll be able to get that kind of information? I think we're not going to do the data entry part of it this time. I think what we are going to do is we're going to do a lot of research on the ways that what states report is not always equivalent or comparable because we have been talking with people who are responsible for doing some of this like vaccine registry reporting, what's going to go on the dashboard and all that kind of stuff.

And it really, really, really seems like it's going to be an almost like identical problem set from the one that we have now. We're basically like every state's going to do their own thing. Yeah. Some states are going to try not to do a thing. That's definitely been part of it. Yeah. And the one thing you can bank on though, like really, honestly, this is like depressing thing to say is that some states are going to do a

pretty fine job, both of like vaccinating people, having a program, making sure that, you know, people who are at higher risk really get it. You know what I mean? All the things. And then some of these are just going to do a shit job and it's not going to necessarily be that state's fault. I mean, some of these states don't have resources. They don't have people, they don't have money to do what needs to be done. And the federal government hasn't delivered that, you know? Right. Just among the many failures, it's hard to remember to catalog that one.

But like, that's really one of them, you know? Like, where were they? These people have been asking for money for these vaccination programs. So like, don't you want to get people vaccinated? Like, it takes money to get the needles in the arm. So that's something that we'll also be'll also be dragging into places that struggle. And before we get there, there is this sort of holiday hell world that we're in to put it in the

bluntest way possible, you know, where we've sort of seen that these gatherings and the colder weather kind of continuing to supercharge how awfully bad the pandemic is. We're talking two weeks out from Thanksgiving and about two weeks before Christmas. At this point, have we seen the full possible effects of travel and gatherings and how much of what we're seeing in real time can actually be attributed to just that? Yeah, I don't think we're seeing a ton of it yet. I think maybe like with cases, you're starting to see the beginning of the Thanksgiving stuff. Certainly not seeing it with deaths and probably not seeing it with hospitalizations.

For the listeners, the thing that I were really specifically looking at on this is you've got a lot of these Midwestern states that had actually started to decline and hospitalizations have started to decline. What we expect to see, I would say, is that that will change. And then you got to, the other thing to really remember, right, is like there's all these people get together on Thanksgiving and travel and all the other stuff.

And there's a set of like primary infections, right? But then the numbers really start to grow when those people then go and infect the other people with secondary infections. And then the next one out, the tertiary infection. So those secondary, tertiary things are going to be happening basically right as people are preparing to travel for Christmas or traveling or seeing people. Right. So it's going to be like, and those are the people who are going to be like, hey, I stayed home. They didn't get infected on Thanksgiving.

They got infected by someone who did get it. Yeah. And the way that that's lining up with the things with the holiday travel schedule around Christmas is pretty gnarly. I mean, it's just like, it's exactly, basically exactly the thing you would not want to have happen. Right. That's really what it is. Like, like if you were to just draw it up, like what's the shittiest thing that could happen between, you know, everybody gets together. Yeah. Exactly. That interval, you just draw it out, like, what's the shittiest thing that could happen between, you know, that would be pretty good. Everybody gets together.

Yeah, at exactly that interval, you know, it's pretty gnarly. So, yeah, so we'll keep you updated on that. Yeah, wow. Well, you know, looking forward, do you think that this sort of data reporting and transparency is going to change in the new administration? I mean, I know that I think it probably will, but, you know, do you think it'll have, I guess, if it does come to fruition in that way, do you think that it'll have a positive change or affect anything at all, given all of this, you know, distrust that people have of the government because the Trump administration handled this so poorly? Yeah, right.

I do think they're going to do a better job, particularly on the presentation side. I think that like, there's almost no doubt that they'll have like some federal dashboard that will be pretty useful and interesting to people. I mean, the CDC has a thing called a COVID tracker. I don't know anybody who uses it because it's mostly filled with useless statistics.

Like there are things that are not helpful for people who are actually trying to understand what's happening right now in their life. They may be useful in the long term as an archive of the things that happen, but it's not designed for consumption of human beings. You know, it's not media in that way. You know, I mean, the Biden's coronavirus advisors have said that they use covid tracking project among other media sources not not the official you know not the national government websites then uh i think the thing i'm worried about honestly most on the data side is like the truth is the teams at hhs i think have been doing a very good job, but they're associated with Dr. Birx associated with coronavirus task force or so she was a Trump administration and

if People aren't careful about which parts that they jettison and which parts they keep And all these great new things which we're just getting a hold of Might go away and I that's something I'm like very legitimately worried about, because it has taken a lot of work to get to this point. So yeah, so that's what I'm actually worried about, like on a day to day basis and working to make sure that like people who are coming in from the Biden administration know that this stuff is important. And that there were good civil servants who were just long-time people who served all kinds of administrations, like at HHS who did a good job. You just gotta figure out how to delineate

the, separate the wheat from the chaff. There were some real assholes also. I mean, truly. I mean, some of the things that the political appointees try to do are just, we're pretty horrible, you know? Yeah. And so, yeah, that's going to be tough to do.

That's exactly right. Well, Alexis, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to us about all this. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having me. That was Alexis Magigal, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project. We'll put a link to his work in our show notes. All right. So we're going to take a break from TempCheck today because we've got a really special Headlines guest. We'll be back with that after some ads. Let's wrap up with some Headlines. Headlines.

We've got a special guest with us today, writer and comedian and one of my favorite regular voices on Hysteria. And also just, you know, follow her on Instagram. She's great. Tien Tran. Tien, hey, how you doing? Good. How are you? So good.

Better now that you're here. Oh, my God. You said favorite regular voices. I'm going to pocket that forever. It's the best. Well, you want to get into some headlines? Let's do it. All right. Cool. Okay. British drug makers have unlocked their inner artsy older brother seeking and receiving approval for a clinical trial of DMT as a treatment for a depression. DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is also known as the spirit molecule because it induces powerful trips, as we all know. It's one of the active ingredients in ayahuasca, which has long been used by shamans in South

America, but has been used more recently in Silicon Valley by entrepreneurs hoping to hallucinate new app ideas, which sounds like my worst nightmare. They don't need to be told their ideas are incredible. The designers of the British study were inspired by trials of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, which showed that psilocybin could reduce depressive symptoms for four weeks. Like in the shroom trials, the DMT study will require patients to take the drug, experience cool visuals, and try to describe it, but it just sounds like they're talking about a magic eye poster,

which I don't know about you, but I could never figure those out. You have to get close. You have to be out. I think I would look at those. You have to be close. I think I would look at those and be like, yeah, I see three dolphins. For sure. We're all seeing the same thing. We're all seeing three dolphins, right? Of course.

And then immediately go into a therapy session. One British pharma exec compared the DMT plus therapy combo to shaking up a snow globe and then letting the flakes settle, which I guess is how scientists talk about the brain once they've experienced ego death. We're all just snowflakes. The company hopes their study will change minds about the therapeutic potential of once stigmatized compounds. You know, this is exciting news, but I'm also terrified and I don't think I'm going to try it.

All the people in this study are named Joe Rogan. That's, I'm convinced. That's 100% what it is. That's true. That's true. Joe Rogan loves it. He does. He's the first one.

Batman could benefit from some ego death, though. Well, another 300-year-old white guy has been canceled. Hallelujah. It's Johns Hopkins, who founded the Baltimore-based university in 1873 and has long been revered as an abolitionist while he was actually a slave owner. If you're a statue of this man, take scuba lessons. Start making lists of the fish you want to see. Maybe try to make the most of all the swimming that could definitely be in your future. Many U.S. universities have ties to the slave trade, which they have confronted to varying degrees in recent years. Johns Hopkins University has mostly avoided those conversations since it was believed that Hopkins' father freed the family slaves in 1807.

What a nice man. And Hopkins Quaker values led him to oppose slavery for the rest of his life. Well, turns out that was based on essentially no evidence. Just a fun little fairy tale. New research has revealed that Hopkins had enslaved people working in his house as late as 1850 and may never have held abolitionist beliefs. So, again, people just saying stuff. Anyway, history was really kind to this old white millionaire.

We'll mark that down as another weird American coincidence. This research was part of an effort by the university to get a better picture of their founder's life since a complete bio doesn't exist. JHU officials say they are doing more

to understand their institution's legacy of slavery. Here's a hot tip. One shortcut to understanding is opening the damn checkbooks. Cut the the check we don't care about his life records i feel like my people made him enough money y'all can throw it back i don't understand they're they're at a university and they don't have access to any sort of like historical documents here yeah it's kind of wild you're at a university and you're not good at research?

Yeah. Yeah. You named it after someone that you don't know shit about? Like, this could be good, right? Seems arbitrary. He sounds like a good man. He's a plural first name. Right.

Too many Johns don't make a right. You know, that's what they say. Real. Okay, here's another one. If you want Amazon to make you feel guilty, but not for all the usual reasons, the company is now selling a smartwatch to encourage healthy living.

Early reviews of Amazon's Halo band say it works like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, only way more invasive. Like a butthole? One flagship feature is its voice tone analysis, which records everything you say throughout the day and then uses AI to evaluate your tone of voice with terms like focused, interested, and knowledgeable,

but also condescending, sad, and stubborn. This was designed by my ex-girlfriend. The goal, I guess, is for you to make the robots who are mining your data think you are a down-ass homie. Definitely worth having zero privacy to turn talking into a video game that you can be good or bad at. The Halo's key statistic for physical health is body fat percentage, and you will not like the way they calculate it. The watch requires you to do a 360-degree underwear photo shoot with your phone. Oh, my God. Zero percent.

That is outrageous. Okay. Then it sends those photos to Amazon's cloud, and it turns your body into a 3D model. Every step of that is a nightmare. Oh, yeah. A.K.A. the forbidden sim. No.

Uh-uh. Oh, my. that is a nightmare oh yeah aka the forbidden sim no oh my the model also has a slider to let you adjust your virtual weight so you can see what you'd look like if for example you chose to destroy your technology and live alone in the woods for 20 years living only on berries and large bugs i've been watching a lot of alone i don't know if anyone watches that, but you need more protein than that. Not enough bugs in the forest? Not enough. The bugs are not enough, okay? It's not a balanced diet. If you just do bugs and berries, you will not make it.

Reviewers seem to agree that the Halo band was not the vibe. I could be on board if Jeff Bezos says this is how he got those Christmas ham-sized arms and beautiful snatched waist. That's what everybody says about Bezos says this is how he got those Christmas ham sized arms and beautiful snatched waist. That's what everybody says about Bezos. They're like, man he is rich, he's ripped, he's snatched. I don't even I don't think I've ever seen a full body photo of Jeff Bezos.

He's too powerful. It would be too powerful. You don't get to see it. I think he looks like a cartoon wallaby. Oh, from like Rocco's Modern Life. Totally. He looks like Rocco from Rocco's Modern Life. He's probably, he's in the height range for that, right?

Yeah, well, if they, if the watch would tell you what you look like as a cartoon character from Rocco's Modern Life, that's what he'd get. That's the upgrade. Yeah, there's no way i would send an underwear picture to jeff bezos he doesn't need it no he doesn't need it for free in this economy absolutely not i mean like i'm barely doing that with like my regular mirror that doesn't capture images yeah exactly okay uh we all know defund the police is a great slogan but did you know it's also something that

people can do? The Minneapolis City Council approved a budget that will shift funds from the police department into other initiatives. The plan, which supporters are calling safety for all, cuts around $8 million out of the city's $179 million policing budget, wow, and redirects it to mental health teams, violence prevention programs, and other alternatives to policing. Originally, the city council approved a proposal that would have also cut the number of police officers in addition to cutting the budget. But Minneapolis mayor and former catalog guy for American Eagle, Jacob Fry, made it clear that he would absolutely veto the entire thing if they did.

So they moved forward without the cap. Council members who supported the plan said the city could no longer accept what they called a broken system of policing and a department resistant to reform. If anyone can think of any other police departments in our country that don't function well, maybe this could work for them, too. could no longer accept what they call a broken system of policing and a department resistant to reform. If anyone can think of any other police departments in our country that don't function well, maybe this could work for them too. I have a few that I can think of really quick. Yeah, just a couple. How much time you got? I'm here all day.

I'll hear about it. Well, Tian, it was so great having you. This has been the best. Thank you so much for having me. That was such a joy. You're wonderful. Well, do you have it was so great having you. This has been the best. Thank you so much for having me. That was such a joy. You're wonderful. Well, do you have anything you want to plug? Yeah.

I'm a writer for a Showtime show called Work in Progress. Season one is available online and season two is coming out soon. It's a great show. Yeah. Hell yeah. Everybody go watch it. Go support it. And go follow Tien.

Again, she's the best. Follow me on Hank Tina. That's right. And again, she's the best. Follow me on Hank Tina. That's right. And those are the headlines. One last thing before we go. If you haven't heard it already, make sure to check out today's episode of Unholier Than Thou. Yeah, Phil is joined by author Alice Hoffman to talk about reimagining Jewish folklore and Crooked's very own John Lovett.

Heard of him for the latest installment of their ongoing segment, Am I Going to Hell for This? It is a very fun episode just in time for Hanukkah. So make sure to take a listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. That is all for today. If you'd like to show me, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, keep that oil burning for eight days and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just the instructions for magic eye posters 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 we look forward to seeing all the Jabas. And all of his friends. Every Jabba buddy. Every Jabba squad. Every Jabuddy. that's what they're called the jibuddies what a day is a production 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 executive producers are Katie Long, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.