It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday,

March 19. As the health and economic fallout from coronavirus spread, the federal government

is now trying to act on both those fronts,

health and economics. They've deployed a 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship to New York, the USS

Comfort, and another one to California, the USS Mercy. The ships have a thousand beds,

operating rooms and other things, and will be used for non-corona cases to ease the load on existing hospitals.

Congress passed, and the president has now signed the first economic relief bill, which includes certain amounts of paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave, free coronavirus testing, food stamps, and more. The Trump

administration is now starting to outline a $1 trillion economic stimulus bill with half in loans

for businesses and half for direct payments to taxpayers. With us now is Congressman Tom Swazi,

Democrat from Northeast Queens and the North Shore of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Congressman, thanks for coming on at this troubling time.

Brian, thanks so much for having me on the show, and thanks for the public service you're doing by getting the information out.

How are you seeing the economic impact in your district so far?

Well, there's no question that people are terrified, and they're starting to be impacted

in real ways. People are getting laid off from their jobs. We're going to see a lot of

unemployment from small businesses. We're going to see businesses risk the possibility of

going out of business. With health care, we look at prevention, we look at testing,

we look at treatment, we look at long-term vaccine. With economics, we need to look at individuals,

then we need to look at small businesses, then we need to look at big businesses, then we need to

look at the economy overall. For individuals, we're trying to do things at the federal level with paid family leave.

We've done some things with unemployment insurance.

We need to do more, I believe.

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