What A Day - The Sick And The Testless

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

We interview Alexis Madrigal, staff writer at the Atlantic and founder of The COVID Tracking project, about the current state of coronavirus testing and why it took so long to get started. Congress still hasn’t reached a deal on the coronavirus relief bill. We discuss where things stand, with five Republican senators in self-isolation and one recently diagnosed with Covid-19. And in headlines: Kentucky does voter suppression while no one is looking, less traffic and pollution, and streaming services cut bit rates in the EU. 

It's Monday, March 23rd. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What A Day, wishing you a happy start to another weird week. Yeah, hopefully it's just like a regular amount of weird and not compounding on the current weirdness that we're already feeling. Yeah, I can't see a bird fall out of the sky or something like that. I will be wrecked. On today's show, a deeper look at testing or lack thereof for the coronavirus, then some headlines. But first, the latest. Yeah, so that was Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline precaution remix.

Honestly, I feel like that song is the closest thing we have to a sporting event these days since everything's canceled. Yes, I am seventh inning stretching just listening to it. Okay, Neil Diamond aside, there's been a lot of news in Congress around the relief bill over the weekend. Get us up to speed on that. All right. So they still haven't reached a deal yet. We could get a vote today, but we also might not. You know, uncertain times, baby.

But yesterday, McConnell failed to get past a procedural vote to move his $1.8 trillion deal forward. Democrats say his bill is flawed and doesn't go far enough to help average Americans or our fragile health care system. For example, minority leader Chuck Schumer said the bill, quote, included a large corporate bailout provision with no protections for workers and virtually no oversight. Democrats want to add conditions on any bailout money to say that companies receiving it must keep workers on payroll, reduce executive pay,

and stock buybacks for their shareholders. And keep in mind that five Republican senators are at home in self-isolation. So that 53 to 47 majority, yeah, it's now a 48 to 47 majority for Republicans. And by the way, 60 votes are required to pass this bill, so it's obviously gonna need bipartisan support. Yeah, just the thing that everyone knows how to do. Of those senators who are out self-isolating, not all of them have contracted

COVID-19 that we know of, but there's at least one notable confirmation from the weekend, yeah? Yeah. So on Sunday, Senator Rand Paul from my old Kentucky home became the first senator to test positive for COVID-19. He's now self-quarantining, though last week he definitely spent a ton of time on the Senate floor around other lawmakers and staffers, which is not great. I should mention that neither the House nor the Senate currently has any plans for remote voting. Honestly, that's something that they should have figured out a long time ago. Yeah, well, they didn't. But back to Rand Paul, who is not only a senator, but also a licensed physician. He was the only senator to vote against the original $8 billion deal to provide emergency coronavirus funding earlier this month. You know,

this man just hates government spending. But speaking of COVID-19 impacting government officials, in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has gone into quarantine after her doctor tested positive. Yeah, really scary stuff. We've heard a lot of concerns about the shortage of masks and other equipment throughout the country. What's the current state of play on that? Right. So various members of Congress, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and a bunch of others have been pushing for more leadership from the federal government on getting more hospital supplies like masks, gowns, ventilators, beds, you know, the basics. There are already reports of health care workers running out of proper masks and having to reuse

masks, which obviously is not ideal. Meanwhile, Trump has sent mixed messages and tweets. On Saturday, he said that he had not used the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to order private companies to increase the production of scarce items because, according to Trump, companies were stepping up voluntarily. He pointed to General Motors and Hanes, which he said would make ventilators and masks. And he said, quote, we want them on the open market from the standpoint of pricing. That, OK. But then on Sunday, Trump said that FEMA would be supplying New York, California and Washington states.

So those are the three states hardest hit by the virus so far, with federal medical stations with 1,000 to 2,000 beds each. But even still, he said he would not implement the Defense Production Act referencing Venezuela and saying, quote, the concept of nationalizing our businesses is not a good concept. You know, just different reasons every day. Okay, well, that's the update for the day on coronavirus as it's affecting Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country. And if you want to and are able to, Meals on Wheels, No Kid Hungry, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Workers Community Foundation,

CDC Foundation, and Direct Relief. That's crooked.com slash coronavirus. The United States has been woefully behind other countries in testing for the coronavirus, leading to an undercount that has left public health authorities across the country flying blind in stemming the spread of COVID-19. This failure can be traced in part to a few key factors. One, the United States deciding to use its own diagnostic test from the CDC instead of the one from the World Health Organization. That would have been okay, except the CDC test had a defect in it and had to be recalled, which delayed things. Two, the FDA initially prevented

private labs from using their own tests. That rule has since been changed, but that slowed things down as well. Three, as cases went up in the United States, a number of state health departments said they were running short on supplies to actually administer tests. So that meant heavy restrictions on who could get tested, i.e. those in critical condition or those with a known exposure to a COVID case from overseas. Yeah, and while other countries were testing thousands a day, the U.S.'s daily run rate was a fraction of that. Meanwhile, virologists like Trevor Bedford at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle were studying the genome of the virus in people in Washington state and finding clear evidence of community spread, even though it was going undetected. Now testing is finally starting to ramp up, but the data is still incomplete. And that's where Alexis Magical comes in. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and also the

co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, which aims to provide the most comprehensive set of U.S. testing numbers. We got him on the phone yesterday and asked him where things stand right now. Capacity has grown a lot. So let's just do it. It's, you know, on the 22nd, cumulative tests went to 227,000. You know, now the kind of run rate's about 45,000. If you go back, you know, just go back 10 days to the 12th as I look at it here. And the run rate back then was like a few thousand probably, you know. So it's a pretty big change. You know, we do have 50 states.

We have a lot of laboratories. The private stuff is coming online. But it's also on a per capita basis, nothing like what we've seen in countries that have successfully kind of flatlined this virus, which would be South Korea is kind of the most prominent example of that. And so, you know, one of the questions now is some of these outbreaks are far enough along that like in New York and in Washington, where you're actually not going to end up testing everybody. You just kind of can't. You're going to end up testing a lot of people in the ICU. You're going to end up testing a select number of people.

But you're not going to test everybody because that's just not where the public health experts don't think that's actually the best way of doing it. So in a lot of states, it still makes sense to do broad-based testing. In other places, it may not and hopefully we'll be able to over time build just enormous testing capacity so as we try and restart you know the modern economy will actually know who has this thing uh you know one of my colleagues jim hamblin says like right now we're sort of in like a pre-germ theory world where basically the only thing we can think of doing is to just say, stay in your goddamn house,

because we don't have any better way of telling you what to do. You know, like, a lot of the disruption you're seeing in society is as a result of this testing failure. And it basically set us back, we can't do the science to do like targeted interventions, we just have to say, slow the metabolism of every city where there are outbreaks. Yeah. And you pretty much covered it, but like, is there any way, like it's Sunday afternoon, there's over 30,000 confirmed cases out of 180,000 that we have the information about, you know, having been tested. So like, yeah, I mean, there's really no way, like, is there any way of knowing how many unconfirmed cases might be out there or like, you know, like guessing? basically the family tree of COVID-19. And once they can do that and they can kind of,

they know viruses change at a certain rate and they can use that sort of like, you know, when they're like, oh, all these languages came from Indo-European and they branched off like 2000 years ago or whatever, you know, that, or probably a lot more than 2000 years ago, but you know what I'm saying? They branched off a long time ago.

They can basically do the same things um with these viral genomes and that will give us a a much better sense i think it's probably going to be the best number we get and then the big other testing thing just for your audience super quickly is there's kind of two kinds of tests there's the kind of test where you are actually like finding the genome you're finding the genetic material of that virus and saying, okay, we have detected this virus. And then later there'll be these antibodies. You'll be testing people for antibodies. And what that will tell you is, have you had this?

Not do you have it right now, but have you had this? And that's gonna be really crucial for restarting modern society again too, because we need to know who's immune and we need to have those people out there doing the work because they're not going to spread the virus to anyone else because they already had it. So that kind of testing is going to come online. Who knows exactly when? But pretty soon, and that's probably after we'll get these viral genomes in. And then after that, we'll start to get real antibody tests that will tell us like how big this thing really was while we weren't looking.

Yeah, right. And there's been a lot of, it is sort of like haphazard and a little bit of like, you know, you just see it as it's developing with like pictures of people in line in like a drive through setting. But what do we know about, broadly speaking, how the testing sites are being run? Like what's the process and are things organized? Is most testing that is currently happening happening at one of those sort of drive-through type locations or at a hospital setting? Man, that's a great question. I think

that it is hard to provide one single answer to it. And it really does seem to vary like place by place by place. Of course, the drive-thru testing seems like a pretty good model, right? Yeah. where they've been able to bring on a lot of testing capacity, but they don't have a totally huge outbreak yet, that's where you're going to see the testing be most effective because you might be able to get to more people sooner. In places like New York, most of that testing is probably going to be in the hospital, particularly as time starts to roll forward, you know, because you really start to do the fuse on this thing, right, is like about five days after you're infected.

That's the sort of time when most people have shown symptoms, but it can keep going, you know, for a much longer time than that. And then, you know, then by the time they're actually sick enough to go into the hospital. So that's the new thing we're tracking now is we're tracking hospitalizations, we're tracking deaths, because that's going to be the other indicator of how severe this is, of course. I mean, on that point, you know, what have you found in the way of tracking hospitalization rates? Like are people mostly finding out they have it, but they don't have a lot of symptoms, so they don't have to go in? Is it already like at a point where people

can't get admitted to the hospital, even if they do find out like what, what sort of the revelation and your research? We only have data on like 15 states, which is unfortunate right now. Most of our hospitalizations are in New York that we know of. So there's 15 states reported. New York is just like a big part of that pie chart. And I think we're going to see, you know, if you just basically do the per capita numbers on this, that tells you a lot about what states are really struggling or are going to struggle as these cases turn into hospitalizations at some rate and then deaths at some rate. And that's like New York, Washington, New Jersey, Louisiana, D.C., Michigan, Illinois, Vermont, Colorado, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Tennessee. And what's interesting about that list, and I think it's really important,

like just sort of, I don't mean politics in sort of a narrow sense, but sort of in the deep politics of that. It's like, this thing doesn't care about if you're in a red state or a blue state. You know what I mean? And so the virus is going to hit all these places and it's probably not going to hit every place exactly the same, but it's not like it's not going to hit all the blue states and all the red states and blue grandparents are going to die and red grandparents are going to die because that

is going to happen absolutely everywhere. And I think to me, that just makes this something that's like really fundamentally different. You can't spin this. There's no, it doesn't matter what the Senate thinks of this. Like it is just really fundamentally different and a real, just sort of like, uh, revenge of the real about sort of what do we need in this country? And how do we as an entire nation come to understand what it is that we need to do to protect the entire nation? And that's true, not just for our nation, but like for the whole world on this virus. You know, like every single country must be on board with containing this thing or every country is going to keep having new outbreaks.

And right now we need to get our own shit under control here in the U.S. And then we need to like work with the rest of the world like we had, you know, in many decades past on these like big public health problems. And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go off on quite that much of a rant, but I know it's fine. I mean, even, you know, as recently as 2014 with the Ebola crisis, but I'm asleep. That's what we need. And, asleep. But that's what we need. And, you know, that's what we need.

That was Alexis Madrigal. Definitely check out his reporting on all of this in The Atlantic and the COVID Tracking Project. It's at COVID19Tracking on Twitter. Happy Monday, WOD Squad. It's week two of lockdown for us, and that means we're slightly more adjusted to this lifestyle than we were a week ago. And that's good news, right? All right, Gideon, what was the best thing you did this weekend? I had a chaotic group FaceTime call,

which was nice. And it was good to see actually like how faces sort of weirdly like zoom in and out when there's five or six people on it. Disorienting and enjoyable. But same key for you, Akilah. What was the best thing that you did this weekend? Okay, so I have two. I'm just gonna be greedy with my time. But one, my friend Jason had a birthday and he is on lockdown in upstate New York. And so he did a Zoom call where we all had a drink at seven o'clock. Oh, awesome. I thought pretty innovative and good. But the other thing, which is, it's not even a humble brag. It's an outright brag. I was on Bob's Burgers yesterday. It's on Hulu today. But I was just really excited because

it's something that I started recording literally last summer. And it's finally out and it's funny and good. So that was kind of a good update. But yeah, that's very awesome. And I was also doomed to fail with this prompt because I knew that that was coming. It was like nothing could top that. That's awesome, though. Maybe you'll watch Bob's Burgers. That'll be the highlight. Honestly, it could be. All right.

Well, this was Life During Lockdown. Shout out to all of you lovely listeners who could be locked down anywhere in the world, but you're here with us. Let's have a good week. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. earthquake to hit the city of Zagreb in 140 years. There were reports of widespread damage, a number of injuries, and some hospitals having to be evacuated, which is a lot for a country to deal with during a pandemic. The health minister continued to urge people to comply with social distancing while dealing with damages, saying, quote, earthquakes are dangerous, but coronavirus

is even more so. People are currently being told to stay outside while maintaining a distance from others. Croatia's parliament will also be postponing sessions due to the extensive damages in the government building. While states across the country passed emergency measures to deal with COVID-19, Republican lawmakers in Kentucky quietly approved a measure to further restrict voting. The law adds a new photo ID provision requiring voters to provide a specific and approved reason for lacking an ID to vote. Before, voters only had to sign an affidavit swearing that they weren't able to get an ID. It's especially hard for voters to get their hands on an approved ID at this moment,

with the DMVs and other government offices closing down due to the pandemic. If passed, the law will go into effect this summer, potentially on track to affect the primary, which has been postponed to June 23rd. Those shady motherfuckers. Maybe you usually listen to this podcast with the top down roaring down the highway while dual exhausts blow hot smoke into a bird's face. Well, you might be doing that less now. And as more companies shift to a work-from-home model to promote social distancing,

traffic has dipped way down in cities countrywide. In Los Angeles, freeways are moving 71% faster during what once was known as rush hour. In New York, similar reductions in traffic have led to a 50% drop in the air's carbon monoxide levels. This effect is by no means permanent, so my sweet bird friends should eat up all that good air while they still can. Aw, eat up babies. Alright, streaming networks are cutting video quality in the EU to avoid overloading networks. This could cause pixelation and make most movies look worse. Trolls World Tour will actually look way better.

Netflix and Disney Plus both hope to cut bandwidth by 25%, while YouTube is displaying all videos in standard definition by default. Amazon Prime and Facebook Video are also pitching in. Normally, Netflix consumes 16% of the world's internet traffic. But during COVID-19, I myself can consume that much traffic before 2pm. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, mail us a coupon, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just chance cards and Monopoly 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 watch Trolls World Tour on VOD on April 10th. Oh, you went with the acronym and I said the whole thing. It's okay. You know what? People are going to know it twice now and they're going to watch the movie. They're going to love it. Watch TWT on VOD.

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 Kashaka.