200,000 Americans Are Dead — And It Will Take More Than A Vaccine To Halt Pandemic

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2020

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is hard to conceptualize 200,000 lives lost. Hundreds more die each day. And a vaccine, with partial efficacy and patchwork adoption, won't be enough to end the pandemic. That would take more testing, contact tracing and social distancing. Also, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was honored in services at the high court.

This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, science correspondent Allison Aubrey and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Evan and I'm Aiden and we're from Bel Air, Maryland. We just finished up
0:06.0	our first week of virtual school and now we're relaxing watching one of our favorite
0:09.6	shows, The Simpsons, this podcast was recorded at 2.07 pm on Wednesday the 23rd of September.
0:18.2	Enjoy the show! Those children are a lot more enthusiastic about virtual
0:25.8	school than I am. Tell me that. Deep breath. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics
0:34.6	podcast. I'm Tamer Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonia's I also
0:38.8	cover the White House. And we are joined by Allison Aubrey of NPR Science Team. Hey
0:44.3	Allison, great to be here. Woohoo! Yeah, so we have you here on a dark occasion,
0:50.8	which is that 200,000 Americans have lost their lives to the coronavirus and
0:56.1	it's not over yet. In fact, that number is up to 201,200 as we speak. It's a
1:02.4	number so large that it is hard to wrap your head around. It's the population of
1:07.9	Tallahassee, Florida and Montgomery, Alabama. So Allison, early on in this
1:13.6	pandemic, it was hitting big population centers. The cases were concentrated,
1:18.4	hospitals were overwhelmed. Now it's spread out in small cities and towns and
1:23.8	suburbs and college towns, but still around 800 Americans are dying every day
1:28.7	from COVID. That's right. You know, early in the pandemic, when it was
1:32.6	concentrated specifically in New York City, most Americans did not know anyone
1:38.0	who had died or been sick with COVID even. I mean, it just felt like a
1:42.0	distant threat to many people. But in recent months, we've seen this
1:46.6	distinct shift, right? Cases dispersed all throughout the country, as you
1:50.6	mentioned, including many small towns from the Sun Belt, including hotspots in
1:55.0	the Midwest now. So it just feels like it's touched all of us. Yeah, and it's
	...

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