July 24, 2020 • 11 mins
Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation’s ineffective response has failed to contain it. There is no unified national response and everything about it has become politicized. Testing continues to remain a problem with long wait times to be tested and to get results, which also makes contact tracing useless. While other countries were able to drive infection rates down, it seems that opening the country back up too soon and without proper guidelines may have been the biggest mistake. Joel Achenbach, reporter for the Washington Post, joins us for America’s response to the coronavirus.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday July. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily Dive
podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. Six
months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation's ineffective
response has failed to contain it. There's no unified national response,
and everything about it has become politicized. Testing continues to
(00:20):
remain a problem, with long weight lines to be tested
and to get results, which also makes contact tracing useless.
While other countries were able to drive infection rates down,
it seems that opening the country back up too soon
and without proper guidelines may have been the biggest mistake.
Joel Achenbach, reporter for the Washington Post, joined us for
America's response to the coronavirus. Thanks for joining us, Joel,
(00:44):
Thanks for having me. I wanted to bring you on
and talk a little bit about perspective, a little bit
about America's response to the coronavirus. It has not gone
so well. Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America.
It's been a face earlier and many many points when
it comes to testing a unified national response. We've talked
(01:06):
about how contact tracing early on was going to be
the big thing to really stamp everything out and identify people,
have everybody isolate. With all the cases surging and so
many going around, it's almost impossible to do proper contact
tracing right now. And the messaging from the leadership. The
leadership is such an important thing. We're hearing things all
(01:27):
over the place, wear a mask, don't wear a mask.
And then beyond that, President Trump just all over the place,
really on this whole thing. Joel tell us about the
response by the country. You cover a lot of bases
there that I think that need to be focused on,
including the messaging. The virus is very contagious. The experts
(01:49):
have said all along, going back to early April and
we had the first big wave of cases. They said,
you can do these interventions like social and things, shutting
down businesses and schools and trying to isolate the sick.
You can do all that. That's really the only tool
you have, and you will see success if you do that,
(02:11):
which is what happened. But they all said, don't ease
up too quickly, don't open up the economy too quickly,
don't go back to business too quickly, because it will
come roaring back and what you want to do is
get the number of infections down to a low level
before you reopen, because if you have a lot of
(02:32):
virus still in circulation, then when you reopen, you're gonna
have more contacts between people and you're going to see
a resurgence. And unfortunately, that's what we've seen in many
parts of the country is some of the states just
opened up too quickly, and a lot of human psychology,
we were sick of the shutdowns. We wanted to go
out and do things. Everyone tired of being in quarantine,
(02:55):
so individual behavior became less cautious, and and you saw
the result. You know, you saw a lot of young
people in particular, who were like, Hey, I'm going to
go to the bar, and those bars became centers of
viral transmission, and so the case floads went up. And
when the case floads go up, eventually you don't see hospitalizations.
(03:16):
We have seen that, and then some of those hospitalizations
become really serious cases with people in I see you
or on a ventilator, and then the deaths go up.
So it's been dismaying because we knew this would happen
if we were not more careful and damage happened, and
the psychology that I think is very important. While people
were pent up and frustrated with being on lockdown, we
(03:38):
were still doing it. We were still participating at that point,
and once everything opened back up, it's like nobody wanted
to go back into the box. But there's a bunch
of states that paused the reopening plans. They're talking about
how Los Angeles might be the first big city to
go back into a lockdown if things keep getting worse.
So definitely, just reopening two quickly and without enough strict
(04:02):
guidelines on that reopening kind of set us back a lot.
How about the response from other countries, because there's a
lot of countries to look towards that have gotten things
under control. They're not having like a second wave things
like that, but we're still having difficulty with that. Many
other countries have done better at preventing that resurgence. Everywhere
(04:25):
in the world is basically facing the same viral threat,
but our country is a little different from a lot
of countries, and we're a big, sprawling country in which
we've seen it has taken a while for the virus
to really take off in some places like the Deep South,
after it initially flared in New York, but many of
(04:45):
the other countries, if you look at you know, Germany,
they prevented widespread transmission. They have not had that many
deaths per capita. France, even hard hit Italy and Spain,
they were really devastated by it, but they've managed to
suppress the resurgence in Europe has in general, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,
(05:07):
Hong Kong, at many places in the in East Asia
have done a very good job of controlling it. And
so one of the questions that people ask is why
are we in the US struggling so much. There's no
simple answer. We talked a lot about the political polarization
and dysfunction, and the failure to have a unified message,
(05:28):
the moments of kind of science denial of minimizing it.
That didn't help. But we're also a country that has
some underlying health issues, chronic diseases and comorbidities. Just as
an example, the obesity is a very high rate in
the US compared to a place like Japan. So I
think that we also have underinvested in public health services
(05:52):
in this country. And so just at the county level,
you have these county health departments that are struggling with
some of the basics day to day of testing and
contact tracing and monitoring the problems in their own communities.
And certainly if you have a testing system in which
it takes a week to get a result, and my
(06:16):
eldest daughter took her eight days to get a result,
and it's that kind of prevents any meaningful contact tracing
because by the time, you know, if you actually had
the virus, you could have spread it to other people.
Of course, if you're careful, you'll just stay at home,
but it would be nice to have results on the spot,
you know, we within a day or two, and so
that's been a disappointment the whole testing regime in the country.
(06:39):
Noted in your article, there's a project called the Global
Health Security Index. This is spearheaded by the Johns Hopkins
Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and
they rank countries on their pandemic preparedness and the US
ranked number one. They had a score of eighty three
point five out of a hundred. I know, like one
of the big things is we have so many people
(07:00):
in the country. The population is huge, so the numbers
are always going to be inflated compared to a lot
of countries. But we got caught so flat footed by
this thing, and it just, uh, you spoke to somebody
from that project, They said, how did the U s
get so caught flat footed by not really trying? And
it seemed like we kept trying to say, it's not
going to happen here. Early on, it's not gonna happen,
It's not gonna be a big deal. And then it
(07:22):
just became so huge to us. It was an issue
that the federal government decided to pass along a lot
of the responsibilities to the states and the and the
local governments. And it's true that healthcare is a local
matter in general, but with a virus like this that
can cross state lines, you have to have a really
(07:44):
strong national, unified federal response with consistent standards. You have
to use the bully pulpit to tell people wear a mask,
take this seriously. You can't send mixed messages. And and
it was it's been tragic that it has gotten drawn
into the culture wars and sort of political identification. You know,
(08:06):
if you wear a mask, it signifies maybe the euroliberal.
It's it's silly because it's not a political partisan issue. Obviously,
no one wants to be in a shutdown, and there
are economic costs to being in shut down, huge economic costs,
and with that comes health costs if people aren't going
to the doctor. I mean, it's a complicated problem to address.
(08:30):
But other countries seem to have handled the crisis more
deathly than the US has. And so what we wrote
in our article is that this pandemic has exposed some
of our issues in this country, like the fact that
we are so polarized and everything is so divisive here
and we don't act in unison the way we could.
(08:52):
That kind of thing that it has has been exposed
by this crisis, and clearly we need to do better.
I think in theory we could do better a thing
Beli've done. And you know, going back to the leadership angle,
it wasn't until this week that the President tweeted out saying, hey,
it's some people say it's patriotic to wear a mask,
and you know, I'm there's nobody more patriotic than me,
(09:13):
your favorite president a picture of him wearing a mask.
You know, it wasn't really until this week that the
President kind of quote unquote endorsed wearing face masks, and
then even early on when we look to the CDC
and our health experts, at first they were kind of
wobbly on that, and then you know, now they are
endorsing wearing mask completely. So I mean even that that
plays in the minds of people as well to who
(09:33):
to believe everybody is kind of against each other, and
that is just such a difficult thing to score away
when we really do need this unified response to try
to stamp this thing down. This is also an interesting
crisis in the sense that an individual can do something.
If you think about many of the world's problems as
an individual, it's hard to know, you know, what can
(09:54):
I do well in this situation. What you can do
is wear a mask and do what you can to
not spread the virus, not take actions that feed the
continued transmission. And because it can be spread asymptomatically, you
don't know if you have it or not. You know,
(10:15):
you could be walking around with the coronavirus and not
realize that the Typically it's odd. Typically you spread it
about a day or two before you develop any symptoms,
and when you develop symptoms, you tend to not be
shedding very much. Virus anymore because your body's immune system
(10:35):
is getting on top of it, and of course the
symptoms you suffer a bit over with the successive day
you shed less virus. So it's a very tricky pathogen,
that's for sure. There's a long way to go still
in fighting this, and you know, obviously, I just hope
for everyone that we can get our act together with
it and hopefully at least limit the spread as we
(10:57):
keep going. Joel Achenbach Order at the Washington Post, thank
you very much for joining us. Thank you so much
for having me. I appreciate it. Hi'm Oscar Ramirez and
this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's
big news stories, you can check me out on the
Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday. So follow us
on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Friday July. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily Dive
podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. Six
months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation's ineffective
response has failed to contain it. There's no unified national response,
and everything about it has become politicized. Testing continues to
(00:20):
remain a problem, with long weight lines to be tested
and to get results, which also makes contact tracing useless.
While other countries were able to drive infection rates down,
it seems that opening the country back up too soon
and without proper guidelines may have been the biggest mistake.
Joel Achenbach, reporter for the Washington Post, joined us for
America's response to the coronavirus. Thanks for joining us, Joel,
(00:44):
Thanks for having me. I wanted to bring you on
and talk a little bit about perspective, a little bit
about America's response to the coronavirus. It has not gone
so well. Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America.
It's been a face earlier and many many points when
it comes to testing a unified national response. We've talked
(01:06):
about how contact tracing early on was going to be
the big thing to really stamp everything out and identify people,
have everybody isolate. With all the cases surging and so
many going around, it's almost impossible to do proper contact
tracing right now. And the messaging from the leadership. The
leadership is such an important thing. We're hearing things all
(01:27):
over the place, wear a mask, don't wear a mask.
And then beyond that, President Trump just all over the place,
really on this whole thing. Joel tell us about the
response by the country. You cover a lot of bases
there that I think that need to be focused on,
including the messaging. The virus is very contagious. The experts
(01:49):
have said all along, going back to early April and
we had the first big wave of cases. They said,
you can do these interventions like social and things, shutting
down businesses and schools and trying to isolate the sick.
You can do all that. That's really the only tool
you have, and you will see success if you do that,
(02:11):
which is what happened. But they all said, don't ease
up too quickly, don't open up the economy too quickly,
don't go back to business too quickly, because it will
come roaring back and what you want to do is
get the number of infections down to a low level
before you reopen, because if you have a lot of
(02:32):
virus still in circulation, then when you reopen, you're gonna
have more contacts between people and you're going to see
a resurgence. And unfortunately, that's what we've seen in many
parts of the country is some of the states just
opened up too quickly, and a lot of human psychology,
we were sick of the shutdowns. We wanted to go
out and do things. Everyone tired of being in quarantine,
(02:55):
so individual behavior became less cautious, and and you saw
the result. You know, you saw a lot of young
people in particular, who were like, Hey, I'm going to
go to the bar, and those bars became centers of
viral transmission, and so the case floads went up. And
when the case floads go up, eventually you don't see hospitalizations.
(03:16):
We have seen that, and then some of those hospitalizations
become really serious cases with people in I see you
or on a ventilator, and then the deaths go up.
So it's been dismaying because we knew this would happen
if we were not more careful and damage happened, and
the psychology that I think is very important. While people
were pent up and frustrated with being on lockdown, we
(03:38):
were still doing it. We were still participating at that point,
and once everything opened back up, it's like nobody wanted
to go back into the box. But there's a bunch
of states that paused the reopening plans. They're talking about
how Los Angeles might be the first big city to
go back into a lockdown if things keep getting worse.
So definitely, just reopening two quickly and without enough strict
(04:02):
guidelines on that reopening kind of set us back a lot.
How about the response from other countries, because there's a
lot of countries to look towards that have gotten things
under control. They're not having like a second wave things
like that, but we're still having difficulty with that. Many
other countries have done better at preventing that resurgence. Everywhere
(04:25):
in the world is basically facing the same viral threat,
but our country is a little different from a lot
of countries, and we're a big, sprawling country in which
we've seen it has taken a while for the virus
to really take off in some places like the Deep South,
after it initially flared in New York, but many of
(04:45):
the other countries, if you look at you know, Germany,
they prevented widespread transmission. They have not had that many
deaths per capita. France, even hard hit Italy and Spain,
they were really devastated by it, but they've managed to
suppress the resurgence in Europe has in general, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,
(05:07):
Hong Kong, at many places in the in East Asia
have done a very good job of controlling it. And
so one of the questions that people ask is why
are we in the US struggling so much. There's no
simple answer. We talked a lot about the political polarization
and dysfunction, and the failure to have a unified message,
(05:28):
the moments of kind of science denial of minimizing it.
That didn't help. But we're also a country that has
some underlying health issues, chronic diseases and comorbidities. Just as
an example, the obesity is a very high rate in
the US compared to a place like Japan. So I
think that we also have underinvested in public health services
(05:52):
in this country. And so just at the county level,
you have these county health departments that are struggling with
some of the basics day to day of testing and
contact tracing and monitoring the problems in their own communities.
And certainly if you have a testing system in which
it takes a week to get a result, and my
(06:16):
eldest daughter took her eight days to get a result,
and it's that kind of prevents any meaningful contact tracing
because by the time, you know, if you actually had
the virus, you could have spread it to other people.
Of course, if you're careful, you'll just stay at home,
but it would be nice to have results on the spot,
you know, we within a day or two, and so
that's been a disappointment the whole testing regime in the country.
(06:39):
Noted in your article, there's a project called the Global
Health Security Index. This is spearheaded by the Johns Hopkins
Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and
they rank countries on their pandemic preparedness and the US
ranked number one. They had a score of eighty three
point five out of a hundred. I know, like one
of the big things is we have so many people
(07:00):
in the country. The population is huge, so the numbers
are always going to be inflated compared to a lot
of countries. But we got caught so flat footed by
this thing, and it just, uh, you spoke to somebody
from that project, They said, how did the U s
get so caught flat footed by not really trying? And
it seemed like we kept trying to say, it's not
going to happen here. Early on, it's not gonna happen,
It's not gonna be a big deal. And then it
(07:22):
just became so huge to us. It was an issue
that the federal government decided to pass along a lot
of the responsibilities to the states and the and the
local governments. And it's true that healthcare is a local
matter in general, but with a virus like this that
can cross state lines, you have to have a really
(07:44):
strong national, unified federal response with consistent standards. You have
to use the bully pulpit to tell people wear a mask,
take this seriously. You can't send mixed messages. And and
it was it's been tragic that it has gotten drawn
into the culture wars and sort of political identification. You know,
(08:06):
if you wear a mask, it signifies maybe the euroliberal.
It's it's silly because it's not a political partisan issue. Obviously,
no one wants to be in a shutdown, and there
are economic costs to being in shut down, huge economic costs,
and with that comes health costs if people aren't going
to the doctor. I mean, it's a complicated problem to address.
(08:30):
But other countries seem to have handled the crisis more
deathly than the US has. And so what we wrote
in our article is that this pandemic has exposed some
of our issues in this country, like the fact that
we are so polarized and everything is so divisive here
and we don't act in unison the way we could.
(08:52):
That kind of thing that it has has been exposed
by this crisis, and clearly we need to do better.
I think in theory we could do better a thing
Beli've done. And you know, going back to the leadership angle,
it wasn't until this week that the President tweeted out saying, hey,
it's some people say it's patriotic to wear a mask,
and you know, I'm there's nobody more patriotic than me,
(09:13):
your favorite president a picture of him wearing a mask.
You know, it wasn't really until this week that the
President kind of quote unquote endorsed wearing face masks, and
then even early on when we look to the CDC
and our health experts, at first they were kind of
wobbly on that, and then you know, now they are
endorsing wearing mask completely. So I mean even that that
plays in the minds of people as well to who
(09:33):
to believe everybody is kind of against each other, and
that is just such a difficult thing to score away
when we really do need this unified response to try
to stamp this thing down. This is also an interesting
crisis in the sense that an individual can do something.
If you think about many of the world's problems as
an individual, it's hard to know, you know, what can
(09:54):
I do well in this situation. What you can do
is wear a mask and do what you can to
not spread the virus, not take actions that feed the
continued transmission. And because it can be spread asymptomatically, you
don't know if you have it or not. You know,
(10:15):
you could be walking around with the coronavirus and not
realize that the Typically it's odd. Typically you spread it
about a day or two before you develop any symptoms,
and when you develop symptoms, you tend to not be
shedding very much. Virus anymore because your body's immune system
(10:35):
is getting on top of it, and of course the
symptoms you suffer a bit over with the successive day
you shed less virus. So it's a very tricky pathogen,
that's for sure. There's a long way to go still
in fighting this, and you know, obviously, I just hope
for everyone that we can get our act together with
it and hopefully at least limit the spread as we
(10:57):
keep going. Joel Achenbach Order at the Washington Post, thank
you very much for joining us. Thank you so much
for having me. I appreciate it. Hi'm Oscar Ramirez and
this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's
big news stories, you can check me out on the
Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday. So follow us
on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.