What A Day - Revisiting Our Favorite Conversations on Coronavirus

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

The past year and more were filled with extreme ups and extreme downs, and as we reflect on that time, we’re looking back on some conversations that moved us, informed us, and made us smile.Today’s show includes interviews with 6th grade special education teacher Monice Seward, NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Sana Khan, a student of public health at the University of Arizona.For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday.

it's tuesday june 1st i'm akilah hughes and i'm getting interesting this is what a day the podcast for grill masters and grill masters in training that's right shout out to everybody who did some meat a lot of people who did some veggies and a lot of people who just hung back and didn't want to get burned. On today's show, we do something a little different. So we've learned a lot in the past year and more about not just the coronavirus, but about America and each other. Yes, some of it was not pretty, but we are getting through it together. So we wanted to revisit some of our favorite interviews from the past few months with people who are making a difference in the world during the pandemic. First up, Moniece Seward. We heard from her a few times throughout the course of last year. She's a sixth grade special education

teacher in Georgia. And when we caught up last fall, right as the school year was about to start, she talked about doing all she could to keep teaching for her kids, but also dealing with the criticism from the school board members who said teachers like her weren't doing enough. It was not the fault of teachers not knowing how to use Zoom. Right. Okay. We were in a situation that many of us had never experienced before. None of us were here when the Spanish flu was around. So we didn't know what a pandemic looked like.

Right. And previous outbreaks were contained. For the most part, they were contained, right? We didn't have to stop going to school when the Ebola virus was out there. We didn't have to stop going to school. So for someone to insinuate that my colleagues and I, and I'm speaking for all the teachers in my district, that my colleagues and I were part of the reason why engagement was low, it was very offensive. Because I know a lot of us were struggling through that time. Because yeah, education is not perfect, but damn it, we love what we do.

And despite the low pay, the disrespect, the fact that we spend our own money on classroom supplies and sometimes food for our students and whatever else they need, we still show up every year. So for that, that one thing to be blamed on low engagement when nobody had taken the time to talk to those families to find out why their kids maybe weren't logging in every day. Or reach out to the teachers and say, hey, what do you need? Because it took us about maybe, I want to say three or four weeks into that emergency learning before our district leadership even pushed out anything to us about social emotional needs of the staff. Right. Because we're dealing with this too, right? Yeah, exactly. Almost all of us have kids too. And then as the time went on, people that I know from work had people who were affected, directly affected by COVID-19. People who, they were losing family members. So for you to say

that engagement was low because of Zoom, I mean, you don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to work Zoom. Everything's labeled in Zoom. If we can't read, we wouldn't be in the classroom. And in terms of the kind of power that teachers can exercise if there is stuff to be done there, we've seen in some other cities and districts, teachers unions being the people that are the ones that are kind of putting a stop to some of the ill-advised plans from other people. So are you in a union yourself? And if so, what sort of actions have they been taking or what conversations are going on around that? Oh, we don't have a teachers union here. We're in a right to work state. So there were some teachers in the district where I live who were protesting at the

county office for the past few days. There are some teachers from that district who've also resigned because they either, they don't have care for their kids or they have a spouse who's immunocompromised. They don't want to take anything home to them because if masks are not going to be mandated and if you can't social distance, why would I want to in the classroom and then take something home to my spouse or to my kids or to another family member who may be, you know, dealing with underlying health conditions. Right. So, but you know what though, this is a perfect storm. We don't have a union here, but I think even though we're, we're pushing back against this, it's going to make, it's going to make things change. We won't see it immediately, but I think now that we have more Black people running for the school board and winning in my district and people getting more civically engaged to find out what's

going on in their local school district to see, you know, if you're in accounting with the highest number of new cases, why are you trying to force teachers to go back into a building? So right now we're limited to what we can do. But I do think that gradually we're going to start seeing some things shift because we some of us are not accustomed to seeing people raise hell. Yeah. Some people are not accustomed to it. And I think now that some of these people are seeing other people step out in front and do this, they're going to be like, oh, okay. So people are doing this and I wouldn't be by myself, even though this is a non-union state. So there's some considerations you have to make in the back of your mind. What would I do if I'm not teaching? How am I going to take care of my family? Because believe me, I've been sitting here thinking of a plan, too, figuring out what I'm going to do to take care of my family.

But more people are willing to speak up now. More people are willing to speak up now because they don't. Who wants to wake up and say, I'm going to go to work knowing that I might get COVID-19, that I might die in 14 days? That was Monique Seward, a sixth grade special education teacher in Georgia, who we spoke to last fall. Yeah. And another conversation we wanted to revisit from the past few months, the guy your parents fell in love with on MSNBC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And even when we spoke in February, he was preparing

us for what we know more about now, that as variants spread and take hold, that those of us who are vaccinated might need a booster shot. I would not be surprised if for a period of time we would have to give an occasional booster to get, one, a more complete protection in the global community, and number two, to get to the point where the level is so low that you don't really have much transmission. Sort of what we did with smallpox, with polio, and with measles. But one of the things that I think leans towards the need to continue to have to vaccinate people is that if you don't get the global level of infection down, there will always be a threat of variants arising wherever, Africa, Asia, South America. And then even though you think you're protected in this country by importation of virus, someone comes into the country with a variant that is not protected by the vaccine, then you got a problem.

That would lead to what you're alluding to is the possibility it might sort of like be what we have to do with influenza. I hope that's not the case. And I believe that we can avoid it if we do a good job of getting the whole world vaccinated with effective vaccines. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, there is that obvious importance to, you know, making sure it's not just the United States or nations that have access to it. And we hear a lot about the variants that were first discovered in the UK, South Africa, and then Brazil. Are there any other variants that you're particularly concerned about? And how much are we in the dark about all of this right now? Well, if it looks like it's clear enough that there's enough penetrance of a virus that isn't fully protected by the vaccine, such as the South African isolate.

I think that the UK isolate, we're in pretty good shape when it comes to that. But if we get a dominant prevalence of the South African, it is conceivable that we may need, and we're already preparing for that, we want to stay a step ahead of the game, is to make a booster that expresses the spike protein of the new variant as opposed to the standard spike protein. So that maybe six months or a year down the pike, you get people who are vaccinated, but you give them a boost, which is a boost expressing the variant that you're worried about. I think that's conceivable. We haven't done it yet,

but we're preparing for the eventuality of having to do that. I mean, personally, I would like for this to not ever happen again. I don't know about you. So what do we actually need to put in place so it doesn't? Like, is it just an ongoing pandemic task force? Like, what steps do you actually want to see taken? Well, all of those things that you mentioned are important. I mean, obviously, we want to be part of the global community. We want to have global surveillance. You know, there were attempts, partially successful some time ago, to get a global network, which is under the category of the global health security network, where you get communications between countries so that when you see a new emerging pathogen arrive, immediately you identify it, you communicate with the rest of the world, and you begin to develop as quickly as possible vaccines and therapeutics against it. You cannot prevent the emergence of a new infection. That usually, almost always, not always, but almost always, is part of what we call the animal-human interface,

where we encroach upon the environment, as we did with HIVAs and chimpanzees, as we did with wet markets having live animals. And that's how things happened in China. Ebola, when you have people going into bat caves and things like that. So if we can essentially pay more attention to not encroaching inappropriately on that animal-human interface at the same time as we develop universal approaches, like a universal vaccine against a certain prototype or a universal antiviral against a certain prototype, we can respond much better. Like I said, we're not going to prevent the emergence, but we want to prevent the emergence from becoming a pandemic. And that's

where we can do something. That was Dr. Anthony Fauci, who we spoke to in February. Yeah. Just a sidebar. He did meet my dog. It's been a long time since they've seen each other, but I think he'd be proud of the little boy that my dog is becoming. I think so too. Anyway, we've got one more conversation from the past. We want to replay for you in just a moment. And it's from someone who put a real smile on our face during this very tough time. That's coming up after some ads. Hey, WOD Squad. So we've been through a lot together in the past year, and sometimes it's been really tough to keep our heads up. But we wanted to wrap up this special edition of the

pod by replaying one of our favorite interviews that really lifted our spirits, Sana Khan. She's a student of public health at the University of Arizona, and she was one of the essential workers registering people when they arrived to get their vaccines. When we connected in March, Sana talked about what the process was actually like and how fun it was to see people relieved and happy. We're on a drive-thru vaccination on the mall. And so people pull up and we've kind of perfected our process. So it's a minute 30 for the whole interaction for them to give us their license, appointment confirmation for us to look them up for us to actually give them the vaccine and have them like go to observation that whole process is down to a minute 30 which is great that we're so fast but tough because we like everyone wants

to be really like chatty and tell you like plans which is great i'm sure yeah yeah my favorite experience so far has been i like took someone's license to confirm their appointment and their date of birth and i thought it was their birthday so I like yelled up to the cars like hey happy birthday and all the other cars started like honking they're like hey happy birthday and so like everyone in this tent all the vaccinators all the scribes like everyone was just like yelling happy birthday to this guy who felt like he was in a parade he like started waving and was like he was like this is the best present i could have gotten which was great and then he was like when can i start drinking can i start drinking in the observation area and we were like please do not do that please drive home first yeah he's like i can't wait to have a drink.

We're like, please don't do that in the observation. Yeah, like other fun stories is I love when people like come through with signs that are like, thank you, health care workers, which is great. I love asking people what their post vaccination plans are. And when we were doing K through 12 teachers, they like unanimously were like, we cannot wait to be back in the classroom. And I can't wait to see like this one specific student. So that was really, it's just so meaningful. Like it never gets old. Like my first person I did and like the thousandth person that I did, like it's the same level of joy for each interaction. I mean, do you encounter people who are hesitant, you know, once they're

there? Or do you encounter it in your life more generally? Like, have you had people say, like, I'm not getting it? I'm scared? Yeah, it's the vaccine hesitancy is so interesting to me. And again, like, this is like my area of research, too. So I'm really interested in it. But for the most part, people are so excited to get the vaccine. For people that are hesitant, it's not for like most of the reasons you would think. Like no one who's hesitant is like, I hate all vaccines. I think there's a microchip in it. Like that's not really what's driving hesitancy at the moment. What's driving hesitancy, I think, is more like a lack of information about it.

And people just want to have like a conversation with somebody they trust about it. And usually like once you have that one-on-one conversation with somebody, like they are usually going to decide to get a vaccine, I think. And maybe this is an obvious question, but what made you want to volunteer for this specific role? Yeah, this is totally my jam. Like this is public health in action. This is like why I got in public health. It's incredible to be able to see like this, like large of a public health effort take place. The obvious answer is it is so refreshing to leave my house yeah seeing strangers and not be you know in front of the computer all day um i mean i'm still in front of a computer but like the computer's outside so exactly but no like seeing people like strangers has been wonderful

just interacting with people um it's so wonderful and it's like the happiest place on earth right now yeah definitely and also just like it's so refreshing and so rewarding to be able to help in any small way i've been working on contact tracing and case investigations like for a full year now and those conversations are so difficult to have with people who have COVID and when you're like trying to contact trace and they're so sick and you know they've lost a loved one to COVID or their whole family is sick like those conversations are so hard to have and they're so draining on like our whole team like we just always talk about like, man, I have like 10 really rough phone calls today. So to be able to like, after a full year of that every day,

to be able to go out in, in, onto the mall and like help people get vaccinated. It's amazing. That was Sana Khan, a public health student at the university of Arizona who we talked to in March. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe,

leave a review, take charge of your Grillmaster journey and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just stuff that helps to process this year, 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 thanks for taking time to reflect. Yeah, we appreciate it. Yeah, we don't do it enough. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun and Jazzy Marine are our associate producers.

Our head writer is John Milstein, and our executive producers are Leo Duran, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.