Welcome to Axis ProRodda, where we normally take 10 minutes to get you smarter on the inclusion of tech, business, and politics.

But today we're doing a special five-part series on the coronavirus pandemic, which is changing our economy, our politics, and our way of life.

I'm Dan Per Mac. This particular episode is focused on how COVID-19 could overwhelm the U.S. healthcare system,

and I'm pleased to be joined by Axios' Sam Baker.

We've heard a lot about how social distancing is designed less to kind of keep individuals safe

and more to prevent the entire health care system from collapsing under the weight of kind of mass, sudden infection.

So let's talk about two pieces here, and the first is staffing.

Healthcare workers obviously are more likely to get sick because they're dealing with more sick people. Is there a lot of slack employment slack in the system where if a lot of health care workers get sick, there'll be plenty more to basically fill in and take their place? No, there absolutely isn't. It's a big problem. There is a lot of employment in the healthcare sector, but so much of that

is administrative. There is really no slack on the clinical side, and there's certainly not

enough slack. If things are really bad, then we certainly don't have enough sort of excess

supply for that. I've heard, and tell me if this is accurate, that because of the testing

issues we have had, in other words, not enough tests, that you often

end up having currently infected patients will go from ER to clinic to wherever, from facility

to facility to facility in order to find a test.

In doing so, they end up exposing lots of these workers who then end up getting sick, correct?

Yeah, the testing issues are, I think, a bigger alarm should be sounding than maybe anybody realizes,

even though everyone sort of understands that it's a problem. But you do have a lot of people

who don't know they're sick, maybe who can't get tested. Just imagine sort of those people go to the

ER because they don't know where else to go. You were in the ER for something else. You broke your

arm. You're sitting next to that person. You know, you can just see how with this lack of systemization, it can just spread and spread and spread. The lack of testing,

can you help people understand this a little bit? Because everyone's trying to understand

how countries, not just South Korea, but countries like Senegal seem to be able to test people,

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