EPIDEMIC with Dr. Celine Gounder

Transcript “We’re not working from home because we want to. Many of us are working from home because we have to. We are all thrust into this social distancing as a result of the pandemic, and in a very short time, we’ve had to adapt to some very unusual circumstances.” - Dr. William Kassler, Chief Medical Officer, IBM In this episode, Dr. Celine Gounder talks to Adam Grant, a professor at the Whar...

Transcript “COVID-19 is the great revealer. It’s showing every crack and fault in the healthcare coverage system.” - Dr. Donald Berwick In today’s episode, co-hosts Dr. Celine Gounder and Ron Klain speak with Dr. Donald Berwick, former administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and senior fellow for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, about how COVID-19 has exposed the...

Transcript “We are not ready to put at risk the lives of those who are going to be on the front lines. And let’s be clear, we’re talking about populations that are likely to be people of color... and likely to be women. These are low-wage workers who do not have the luxury of refusing to return to work. If they refuse the call of their employers, because we live in a right-to-work state, they are...

Transcript "Resources that we've been using as reasonable accommodations are now being taken up by the rest of society due to shelter in place policies, and obviously this is something that's really important to do.” -Rebecca Cokley In today’s episode, co-hosts Ron Klain and Dr. Celine Gounder speak with Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. Senator Hassan discusses her work in the Senate as the...

Transcript “As a nation, we've got to put in place a public health system that includes disease preparedness, so that we're ready for whatever is the next shock. And that all of us, no matter who we are, what social-economic status, what race, ethnicity, what job we have, that we don't have to go through this again. It's in our hands. We can do it. And it is within our reach to be able to end thes...

Transcript “There’s no social distancing in the prisons, almost no protective gear for anybody, and if you also have a serious mental illness… you can’t expect them to take any of the precautions that include keeping away from other people. And you can’t expect them to take care of themselves when they can’t do it for their larger illnesses. If we look at those who are most vulnerable to getting t...

Transcript "The other point I made about ventilators is, they're not a panacea. Many patients don't survive them, but I don't think that reduces their importance. I think, if anything, the fact that many patients don't survive means we need to make sure that as many patients as could benefit from them actually get them. I hope that one thing we get out of this crisis is enough of a supply so that,...

Transcript “I mean, many of us spent the whole ‘80’s in a state of terror, knowing that we'd been exposed, not knowing our status, not knowing whether we were going to live or die. And I think the vast majority of the population now has exactly the same feeling, where they don't know if they've been exposed. They don't know if they're going to get sick. Every single person is a risk.” - Mark Harri...

Transcript "It’s not an on/off switch. We are living with coronavirus until we get a vaccine, and that could be 18 months, if we’re lucky.” - Juliette Kayyem In today’s episode, co-hosts Dr. Celine Gounder and Ron Klain discuss what we could have seen coming with this pandemic and speak with Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government a...

Transcript "People who don’t have access to medical care, people who don’t have access to the healthcare system in general, are going to be much more vulnerable. They are not going to be treated, they are going to get sick, they are more likely to die, and they are also more likely to spread the virus to other people.” -Jeneen Interlandi Co-hosts Dr. Celine Gounder and Ron Klain speak with New Yor...

Transcript “I think today we are going to be doing roughly 125,000 meals across America in very strategic places. Restaurants transforming to Community Kitchens are going to be playing a vital role in every neighborhood of America to provide basic food relief for people in need. And obviously, if you can, you pay, but if you cannot pay, that's fine. No questions asked.” – Chef Jose Andres How do y...

Transcript “The nation is confronting this kind of social distancing and quarantine for the first time in the modern era, and it isn't clear to me that the laws in place are going to be sufficient. We haven't had enough protections. We don't have paid sick leave, a lot of companies are not giving time off to low wage workers in a way that makes them feel secure...And so this is a problem because n...

Transcript "I have to say it's really weird to be at Bellevue right now. On the one hand, it feels like a ghost town. Basically, the hospital has cleared out, largely devoting itself to coronavirus patients. It's eerily quiet except for pages overheard every hour or so for patients who are getting worse and need to be transferred to the ICU and put on a ventilator." -Co-host, Dr. Celine Gounder In...

Transcript On March 14, 2020, Roxanne Khamsi published an article in Wired magazine: " They Say Coronavirus Isn't Airborne—but It's Definitely Borne By Air ." In today's episode, Dr. Celine Gounder speaks with Roxanne and Dr. Lydia Bourouiba, an Associate Professor at MIT who directs the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory. They speak about the difference between airborne and droplet...

Transcript Michael Donnelly is a professional data scientist, policy researcher, and economist. He joined us to discuss epidemiological modeling of the #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. His conclusion: we're running out of time. You can read Michael's Medium posts here: https://medium.com/@donnellymjd/no-good-options-dda04260b232 https://medium.com/@donnellymjd/covid-19-new-york...

Transcript “I think as we get testing capability out, and we get the ability to treat the population, we can't forget that there's many people that don't have the choice to self-isolate. They have to go to work every day because they get paid by the hour, and we have to do our best to keep them healthy.” - Andy Slavitt In today’s episode, co-hosts Dr. Celine Gounder and Ron Klain speak with Dan Di...

Transcript “The goal is to try to keep as many people from being infected for as long as possible to try to effectively stretch this thing out so that the hospitals are dealing with fewer cases.” - Helen Branswell  In today’s episode, co-hosts Dr. Celine Gounder and Ron Klain discuss the concept of flattening the curve and what impact this can have on healthcare workers and hospitals. They speak w...

Transcript Our special guest this week is Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the New York City Health Department. As head of the CDC during the Ebola epidemic in 2014, he played a critical role in the CDC’s unprecedented and heroic deployment of personnel to West Africa and was President Obama’s top public health a...

Transcript “We cannot build a wall, a real wall, or a metaphorical wall to keep this disease out. We have to understand it's coming. It's here already. It's going to come to a greater extent and we need to be preparing to deal with that.” -Ron Klain In today’s episode, our co-hosts Dr. Celine Gounder and Ron Klain discuss whether the U.S. should be appointing a coronavirus czar to oversee and coor...

EPIDEMIC is a new, weekly podcast on the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19). Hear from some of the world’s leading infectious disease and public health experts. We’ll help you understand the latest science, the bigger context, and bring you diverse angles—from history and anthropology to politics and economics—depth and texture you won’t get elsewhere. Hosted by Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious...