Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Monday, February. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the Daily Dive. Texas is still trying to
recover from a winter storm that left millions without power
for days. The efforts are now focused on getting people
food and water. While President Joe Biden has declared a
major disaster there bring up more federal funding to help out.
(00:23):
At the same time, Senator Ted Cruz is still trying
to smooth over a pr disaster from his trip to Cancun.
Gender Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital editor at NBC News, joins
US to break it all down. Next, the pace of
vaccinations in the US is starting to pick up. The
many distribution sites are still recovering from an initial botched rollout.
(00:43):
Many local health departments and hospitals were in the dark
about how many doses they were getting and when they
would be delivered. Officials also overestimated how many doses to
set aside for nursing homes. Sarah Krause, reporter at The
Wall Street Journal, joins US for vaccine distribution problems. Finally,
the pandemic has forced one of the fastest and most
sweeping shifts in human behavior in modern history. At one point,
(01:06):
almost half the population was spending more than eighteen hours
a day in their homes with their families. According to
the dat of how families were spending their time television
one big time. People also devoted more time to working
and taking care of their children. Andrew Van Damme, reporter
at The Washington Post, joins us for how we all
spend our time. It's news without the noise. Let's dive in.
(01:29):
I am supporting well checked right now because we really
don't know. This is a big city, and we've been
without power. We don't know who is still in their
home and who didn't make Joining us now is Ginger Gibson,
Deputy Washington Digital editor at NBC News. Thanks for joining us, Ginger,
Thanks for having me. Texas is still trying to recover
(01:50):
from the winter storm that took out its power grid.
It left millions of people without power. You know, a
lot of that power has been restored now, but the
focus now is getting people food in water. There's a
bunch of counties that have orders to boil their water
before they can use it. Um it's still kind of
a mess out there. And this is also you know,
one of the first tests for President Biden and how
(02:11):
he handles a crisis. He declared a major disaster for
many of the counties there, and you know that helps
with federal funding being available to these hard hit communities
and all that. Um So, so what are we seeing
there in Texas? Texas is still in a really tough spot.
My native land, so I still have a lot of
family that lived there, and they're really struggling. The powers
(02:32):
come back on in a lot of places, but a
lot of places still don't have water. They're still having
to boil their water or obtain it from elsewhere. And
you're right, this is a real test of the Biden administration.
FEMA and organization that has been tasked with handling these
sort of things has also under Biden, been tasked with
handling the pandemic. So they're stretched very thin. But we
(02:52):
saw him, as you said, declare a natural disaster, give
this declaration. They sent generators to hospitals and shelters, they
sent water. I think we're gonna watch this unfold and
I think, you know, any politician who is worried about
being blamed for how Texas has responded was really grateful
for Ted Cruise this week sort of took all of
(03:13):
the distractions away and made everyone who wanted to blame
a politician sort of focus their attention on him. Yeah,
and that's the other, you know wrinkle in this whole story.
While Texans are trying to recover from all of this,
you have Ted Cruz trying to get away to Cancun.
And then, you know, the thing that really makes it
bad for all politicians is when you start lying a
(03:34):
little bit and he said, oh, it was from my daughters.
I was only going to go for one day. It
ended up looking like he was in a state throughout
the weekend at least. And you know, all that stuff
comes back. Now he comes back and he posts, you know,
pictures of him like loading bottles of water into a car,
you know, showing that he's part of the effort and everything,
and people just say, what a way to fake compassion. Now,
so a big pr disaster on his hands. It's been
(03:57):
a complete pair disaster on his I mean, leaving your
state and in a disaster when you're a steid elected
official is never a good idea. Leaving to go to
Cancun in the pandemic probably an even worse idea. And
then trying to just post few pictures to make it
go away, not going to solve the problem. He'll be
answering questions about this for a while, even if it
(04:19):
doesn't affect his political fortunes. I mean, he doesn't stand
for re election for another four years. He's probably going
to run for president again. I think most people who
are inclined to support him will not be bothered by
this by then, But still has been just a really
terrible episode for him. It's a tough call. You know,
If you have the means and you could get away
to somewhere a lot warmer, I'm willing to bet almost
(04:40):
everybody would do that. But you know, when you look
to the leadership of your state to help constituents get
through this type of stuff, it just looks really bad.
Last week, also, Democrats unveiled an immigration bill. It looked
very similar to what Joe Biden had proposed in his
first days in office Pathway to Citizenship or in about
eight years, among other things. But once again, this one
(05:01):
looks like it's going to be long odds that this
will get past. Very unlikely that this bill ever becomes law,
at least in the form that it is in right now.
There's always a possibility that some kinde of compromise bill
could get past, but right now we just don't see
signs that Congress is looking to do big things bipartisanship. Um,
you know, they're going to pass this COVID bill with
(05:22):
only Democratic votes. Maybe one or two Republicans jump on board,
but that seems very unlikely at this point. So just
not there yet. And and this type of legislation, it's
very much a liberal wish list. It's not going to
get any Republican support. Um, And getting it done without
Republican support is likely to be impossible. Yeah, it'll be interesting.
And we've talked about this before, kind of the contrast
(05:45):
from the way President Trump handled things. But how much
political capital will Joe Biden put into this effort? Yeah,
that's a great question. He's put very little at this point.
You know, this is really just a piece of legislation
to make this base happy, and we haven't seen any
signed so far that it was anything beyond that. But
I do think that we're going to see the talks,
(06:06):
They're going to see them pointing to it, and once
they get past COVID relief in the next few weeks
maybe then some type of talks to see if they
can find some type of compromise. Looking ahead to this week,
Judge Merrick Garland is going to have his confirmation hearing
to be the next Attorney General. You know, we'll see
how that goes. He said he's going to fight domestic
extremism and terrorism, and you know, just kind of has
(06:29):
his work cut out for him there at the Justice
Department after what we had the last four years under
Trump and even Bill Barr, that's right, you know, the
last four years Democrats have been very critical of the
Trump Justice Department for being too political. President Biden has
said that he wants no politics to play a role
in his current administration. The questions that are going to
(06:50):
come from both Republicans and Democrats likely to be very tough,
but also likely to be hitting on a number of
problems that the nation faces, like you poy at epidemic,
where as you mentioned the January sex attack on the Capitol,
as well as sort of what happens to Trump and
what happens to his family, and what happens to investigations
that have been launched into him. I think it's going
(07:11):
to be a real interesting controvation battle to be watching.
Gender Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital Editor at NBC News, thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks telling me failed
to mobilize the effort to administer the shots, failed to
(07:34):
set up vaccine centers. That changed the moment we took off.
Joining us now with Sarah Krause, reporter at the Wall
Street Journal. Thanks for joining us, Sarah, thanks for having me.
Vaccines in the US are starting to ramp up, but really, overall,
it's it's been a botched rollout. There's just been problems
all over the place everywhere, from limited vaccine doses that
(07:58):
were available, misscommune vacations with states, misallocated supplies. We're even
seeing um the appointment websites have been a mess for
a lot of people trying to get their appointments to
get their vaccinations. It's been a tough go, but these
were always going to be major problems, the largest vaccination
effort really that the country has ever undergone. So, Sarah,
(08:19):
you wrote an article talking about kind of all the
problems that we saw throughout this help us walk through
some of this. So the story looks at the really
rocky initial days of this rollout, and some of the
reasons why early on there were sort of ten millions
of doses that had not yet made their way into
arms and why that was and so there were a
number of different reasons. One is this sort of fragmented
(08:42):
chain of communication from the federal government down through the
states to the sites that are actually giving doses, and
a lack of transparency at the local sites level of
what supply they can expect, when they should start scheduling appointments,
and when they will have those doses in hand to
get those shops and arms. Another was overestimating by the
federal government how many elderly people in skilled nursing or
(09:05):
long term care facilities would need or want doses. Now,
the goal of that was to ensure that they did
not get themselves in a position where they didn't have enough,
but in the end they overestimated how many both residents
and staff would take the vaccine, and that meant that
many states are now reallocating, in some cases tens of
thousands of doses that were sort of set aside for
(09:25):
that population to other priority groups, and all of that
takes time. A lot of states are saying they don't
have access to the government database that says when they're
going to be getting the doses and how many. We
know that's been a problem. We've seen mass vaccination sites
like Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles have to close down
because they didn't have enough vaccines, and then the reporting
back also, you know, sticking with California, there was one
(09:49):
clinic family center that was reporting the doses, but it
wasn't getting uploaded properly. So when it came time to
see how many they had administered, it's they only had
an administered seven hundred vaccinations when really they had done
ten thousand doses. Probable Number one was the transparency. You know,
there is a federal system called Tiberius that the federal
(10:11):
government uses to communicate with states and let them know
what their allocations are and where those doses are along
their path. There it's sent up to states in many
cases to communicate with hospitals and local sites as to
what they can expect of the states allocation. So what
we found was many of the local administrators or the
people that were ultimately going to be bringing nurses on
site to give doses, we're waiting until they had those
(10:33):
shops in hand because they didn't want to find themselves
in a position where they were canceling appointments last minute,
so they waited till they got the doses, then they
opened up appointments, then they had the appointments. But what
that means is that there's many days in between where
those doses are just sitting around. Equally, on the reporting side,
you get these data lags between when the federal government
says it's shift doses and when those sites actually report
(10:53):
back what they've done. So you've had some technological glitches,
and in other cases, you have small local public health
departments that are reading people's handwritings at the end of
the day and manually entering that into reporting systems, and
that is often done within twenty four hours. But these
are also agencies that are severely stretched financially and staff wise,
so there can be delayed built in there too, so
(11:14):
it's not always clear exactly what's been given where and when.
One of the other big things behind all of this
was federal officials overestimated how many doses should be set
aside for people like in nursing homes and the staff there,
and we were seeing a lot of those people refused
doses so there was just an overallocation to that front,
(11:36):
and then that just means it couldn't be pushed to
other tiers in the rollout exactly. And you see states
across the country now shifting those doses. So there, I'll
be really clear, there were tens of thousands of doses
in different states that were never actually shipped out. They
were sort of allocated, you know, like on paper, but
not physically shipped to those locations. But still they were
(11:57):
set aside for a purpose that they weren't actually needed for.
And and so now you're having those shifted back to
recipients that do want them and can use them. But
all of that process takes time, and you know, the
idea behind that program was, you know that old people
are particularly vulnerable to this virus. Nursing homes have been
the site of really deadly outbreaks and have taken a
huge toll. So federal officials didn't want to find themselves
(12:19):
in a position where there weren't enough doses for both
the residents of those facilities and the staff that work there.
But what they didn't quite factor incorrectly was the hesitancy
that they would encounter with staff not being as interested
in getting vaccinated as you might expect. And also, you
know a number of elderly people have now moved back
in with family or passed away during the pandemic, so
(12:39):
the estimates greatly overstated the number of people that were
actually in those facilities. What is the Biden administration said
so far about how they're trying to fix these problems
or expedite the whole process? Now, you know, the Biden
administration has said that they are setting up more vaccination sites,
more mass vaccination sites, and stadiums and convention centers. They're
providing more transparent see around what number of doses states
(13:02):
will get and when, which can help on the forward
planning process. And so you're seeing a couple of incremental
steps that are meant to make this process from start
to finish smoother. And you know, one of the interesting
things about all this is we have these vaccines that
were developed in record time and then they were shipped out.
The real challenge has been that last mile, and that's
where you see both the federal government and state scrambling
(13:24):
to get it right and improve it because people are
so frustrated. You know, it's been very hard to make
an appointment. You're constantly refreshing browsers, and especially in the
early days of business is for older people and vulderable
people who might not be as tech savvy and able
to check by websites all day. So you have this,
this frustration and this scramble to get it right. Sarah Krause,
(13:45):
reporter at the Wall Street Journal, Thank you very much
for joining us. Thanks for having me. Our free time
was able to be too voted to work, but I
realized that that isn't true of most folks, including many
(14:05):
of my colleagues, who are juggling a million things right now.
They're juggling kids at home, They're juggling, you know, a
spouse at home who knows what else, And for them,
the time est during the pandemic has been a much
more complicated situation. Joining us now was Andrew Van Damme,
reporter at the Washington Post. Thanks for joining us, Andrew,
(14:25):
glad to be here. You wrote an interesting article for
the Post talking about the results of everybody being cooped
up at home. Obviously, the pandemic the huge disruptor to
everybody's lives, and a lot of people at one point
stop going to work. They stopped going out to their
normal activities, restaurants, bars, just out socializing. All that. Everybody
(14:47):
was stuck at home with their family members, and you
were crunching the numbers on the dad and everything, and
a lot of people were turned to watching massive amounts
of television. People worked more. You think people would be
working less since they were home, but they actually devoted
more attention to working at home. Obviously, parents devoted more
(15:07):
time to taking care of their children. There's a lot
in here, so Andrew help us walk through some of this. Personally,
I've been extremely lucky during the pandemic because I don't
have any kids and my spouse and I can very
easily work from home. So for us it has been
one of those things where we do see our productivity rise.
(15:28):
It would be in line to say, as some researchers
from Stanford and the Mexican Institute of Technology found that
we were able to spend about our free time was
able to be devoted to work. But I realized that
that isn't true of most folks, including many of my colleagues,
who are juggling a million things right now. They're juggling
(15:50):
kids at home, they're juggling you know, a spouse at home,
who knows what else, and for them the time you
just during the pandemic has been a much more complicated situation.
So that's what we tried to dig into. People watch
TV a ton already, being at home, not much else
to do. That kind of just rose even more. And
you you would hear, you know, in the middle of
(16:10):
the pandemic people making jokes like, hey, I watched all
of Netflix already, so that was kind of true. You know,
people really increase their time in front of the television.
There was a big difference between folks like me who
don't have children at home, so yes, we had a
lot more time to spend on the television and folks
like many of my co workers who have kids at home.
(16:34):
And for parents, actually their biggest activity wasn't television, it
was childcare. Because schools are closed, kids are home. It's
just an enormous burden on working parents. And the effect
on the parents is uneven. You know, we always hear
how the burden is much more on women, and this
held true to both parents increase their time watching children,
(16:55):
but for women and increase so much more. Oh, absolute lead,
and we don't have great federal measures of that right now,
Like normally, if I can get a little bit into
the weeds, the federal government every month sends out time
use diaries to a couple of thousand people and tracks,
you know, exactly how they spent their time. That would
be super useful for this story. But unfortunately, during the pandemic,
(17:19):
time use diaries, like many other things, were suspended, so
we don't have data from those key pandemic months of
April and May, but we can look at other things
such as well. A University of Illinois economist touch down
a dear AGAINA and her colleagues surveyed about twenty thousand
academics and asked, hey, how much time have you spend
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on work? How does that compared a pre pandemic And
of course you know, are you a parent and how
old are your kids? And they found that the amount
of time that working women could spend if they had
to take every young child, the amount of time that
working women could spend working shrank by an hour and
forty five minute every single day. They lost an hour
(18:01):
or forty five minutes of a worktime relative to a
childless male such as myself. I don't know if we
can emphasize the magnitude of these things enough. Normally, when
the time use survey comes out every year, I lose
my mind if it's a change of fifteen minutes of
ten minutes, and here I'm talking about an hour and
forty five minutes of worktime just gone. The other thing.
(18:24):
You know, obviously, everybody's home life is not the same
as you've been mentioning. You know, you you don't have kids,
same thing with me, But there's couples that are at
home and with their families also, But the burden is
also different. For people that are single, the isolation is different,
and so they were also affected differently. Well, think of
it this way. When couples are together, time use data
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has shown that their overall happiness and life satisfaction rises
with you know, every extra hour that they're able to
spend together during the day, which makes sense. But for singles,
for every hour that they're alone during the day, their
happiness their life satisfaction falls. And now we're in a
situation where singles have been in this situation of forced
(19:06):
a loneness for almost a full year. That is gonna
have you know, long running psychological effects, and it's going
to be compounded for say, single parents who have been
alone with children for a year with very little support.
Andrew Van Damme, reporter at the Washington Post, thank you
very much for joining us. Yeah, thanks so much. That's
(19:35):
it for today. Join us on social media at Daily
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(19:58):
Dive brother back