'Battlefield Medicine' In Los Angeles ICU As Biden Launches 'Wartime Effort'
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
That effort begins with taking charge of a bottlenecked vaccine rollout. NPR pharmaceutical correspondent Sydney Lupkin reports on several factors that are slowing the process down. And NPR's Yuki Noguchi explores why it may take some time for pharmacies to become major vaccine distribution sites.
The need for more vaccine is a national story, but the wait is especially excruciating in Los Angeles. NPR's Leila Fadel visited one hospital pushed to the brink, where doctors compare their work to "battlefield medicine."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The good news is that the rate of new infections might be slowing down. |
| 0:05.4 | Right now it looks like it might actually be plateauing in the sense of turning around. |
| 0:12.1 | On Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in his first White House briefing as the Biden administration's |
| 0:17.6 | chief scientific advisor on the pandemic, said case growth appears to be slowing slightly, |
| 0:23.5 | but scientists need more data to say that for sure. He also appeared to joke about how much |
| 0:28.7 | easier it is now to be honest with the press. One of the new things in this administration, |
| 0:33.8 | if you don't know the answer, don't guess. Just say you don't know the answer. Yeah. |
| 0:39.7 | When asked to expand on that joke later, he said, you said I was joking about it. I was very serious. |
| 0:46.8 | About it. I wasn't joking. No, actually, it was a striking moment. The government's top pandemic |
| 0:53.2 | scientists admitting he could now speak to the American people, honestly, without repercussions. |
| 0:59.3 | So, if the good news was a plateau in infections, the bad news is that the number of people dying |
| 1:05.0 | each day in America is still between three and four thousand. Again, that's each day. |
| 1:11.7 | At that pace, the US will easily eclipse half a million people dead in about a month, |
| 1:16.8 | and our supply of vaccines appears to be running short. Our national plan launches a full-scale |
| 1:22.0 | wartime effort to address the supply shortages by ramping up production and protective equipment, |
| 1:27.9 | syringes, nails, you name it. Thursday at the White House, the president laid out more details |
| 1:32.4 | about his administration's pandemic response plan and tried to emphasize the scale of the death toll. |
| 1:38.2 | Four hundred thousand Americans have died. That's more than have died in all of World War II. |
| 1:45.9 | Four hundred thousand. This is a wartime undertaking. Consider this. A new administration has promised |
| 1:56.3 | an honest scientific view of the pandemic. A new president's view is that America is at war. |
| 2:02.4 | We'll take you inside a Los Angeles ICU, or doctors say it feels just like that. From NPR, |
| 2:18.4 | I'm Adi Cornish. It's Friday, January 22nd. This message comes from NPR sponsor Comcast. |
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