99,000 People Dead And A Dire Summer Prediction
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Researchers have found the coronavirus was introduced to the U.S. in part by affluent travelers — but those weren't the people hit the hardest.
Cathy Cody owns a janitorial company in a Georgia community with a high rate of COVID-19. Her company offers a new service boxing up the belongings of residents who have died. Read or listen to the full story from NPR's Morning Edition.
Plus, rollerblading is having a moment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 99,000. That is the number of people who have been confirmed to have died from COVID-19 |
| 0:07.4 | in the United States as of Tuesday afternoon. Let us be perfectly clear. All countries |
| 0:14.0 | need to remain on high alert here. Maria Ben Kirkhov, epidemiologist at the World Health Organization, |
| 0:20.4 | says that even as some countries see cases decline, those declines are the direct result of |
| 0:27.1 | social distancing and other public health measures. Most people have no immunity and the coronavirus |
| 0:34.7 | is still really good at spreading. That means that the virus will take that opportunity to amplify |
| 0:41.1 | if it can. Coming up with summer coming and more states opening up, why the pandemic might still |
| 0:47.9 | feel abstract to some people for now. This is coronavirus daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's |
| 0:56.0 | Tuesday, May 26. As the U.S. approaches 100,000 deaths, scientists have been looking back |
| 1:09.5 | with the past few months to get a better picture of how we got here. So one of the things that we've |
| 1:15.0 | been working with recently is trying to get a handle on when the surge in excess mortality actually |
| 1:22.7 | started. Jarvis Chen, a social epidemiologist at Harvard, has been studying where people died |
| 1:28.2 | this year and who those people were. The data show deaths rising sharply in April. Those reflect |
| 1:35.6 | the introduction of coronavirus into communities by more affluent people who were traveling in the |
| 1:43.6 | early part of 2020. But those people did not wind up being hit the hardest. What happened is that |
| 1:50.5 | it spread to other communities and that's where we see the real surge, sort of like when you |
| 1:56.3 | light a match and throw it into a bunch of Tinder that it really takes off. The virus moved on |
| 2:02.8 | and killed more and more people who were not affluent. People with more chronic diseases, |
| 2:08.8 | people of color, people whose jobs were considered essential. Public transportation workers, |
| 2:14.3 | meat processors, nurses, aids, and assistants, delivery people. These are communities in which people |
| 2:20.8 | may be working, quote unquote, essential jobs where they're unable to practice physical distancing. |
| 2:27.6 | These are also communities in which people may not be getting access to testing or to care. And so |
... |
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