Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day fifty four
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story.
Speaker 1: Healthcare professionals are hailed as heroes for treating patients on
Speaker 1: the front lines of a global crisis, but they're facing
Speaker 1: a crisis of their own. The outbreak is straining their
Speaker 1: mental health with tragic consequences. But first, here's what happened today.
Speaker 1: Federal health regulators said they would tighten oversight of antibody
Speaker 1: tests that can tell whether patients have been infected with
Speaker 1: the new coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration said today
Speaker 1: that the makers of the test would have to apply
Speaker 1: for authorization within ten days of putting products on the market.
Speaker 1: Since mid March, the FDA had been allowing them to
Speaker 1: sell the tests without any government sign off. The f
Speaker 1: d A had originally relaxed its rules to give drug
Speaker 1: makers flexibility to get the tests to market faster, but
Speaker 1: some manufacturers allegedly made false or inappropriate claims, and the
Speaker 1: accuracy of some tests was questioned. The FDA has given
Speaker 1: emergency authorizations to twelve antibody tests and said that two
Speaker 1: hundred are currently in the review process. Meanwhile, the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen treatment, remdesvie, is moving quickly through the drug pipeline.
Speaker 1: The anti viral drug was approved for emergency youth last Friday,
Speaker 1: and Gill Lead Sciences, the maker of the drug, says
Speaker 1: it plans to get it to patients as soon as
Speaker 1: this week. Early results from an ongoing study show remdesvie
Speaker 1: reduced the time it took hospitalized COVID nineteen patients to recover. However,
Speaker 1: the journal The Lancet published results of the same week
Speaker 1: from a small Chinese study that showed less promising results.
Speaker 1: Even though the tests and treatments the FDA is fast
Speaker 1: tracking have yet to even begin containing COVID nineteen, many
Speaker 1: places have already begun restarting business. That's true of companies too.
Speaker 1: Carnival Cruise Lines plans to sail ships again on August one.
Speaker 1: It's the first major cruise operator in the Americas to
Speaker 1: talk about reopening coronavirus outbreaks spread widely on several cruise
Speaker 1: ships earlier this year. The first cruises will set sail
Speaker 1: from Galveston, Texas, Miami, and Port Canaveral, Florida. Other cruises
Speaker 1: have been canceled through August thirty one or longer. It's
Speaker 1: unclear who will sail or how safe it would be
Speaker 1: to cruise with the virus still likely to be at large.
Speaker 1: When the industry shutdown had been March, outbreaks at sea
Speaker 1: had reached havoc. The confined spaces are a perfect vehicle
Speaker 1: for the virus to spread, and passengers were trapped aboard,
Speaker 1: some of whom died and now our main story in hospitals,
Speaker 1: healthcare workers are under threat from more than just the
Speaker 1: coronavirus itself. The mental health effects of the work are grave. Recently,
Speaker 1: the head of emergency medicine at a New York area
Speaker 1: hospital died by suicide. Doctors and nurses fighting COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: are watching patients die at rates rarely seen in civilian medicine,
Speaker 1: and they're delivering the news to family members who aren't
Speaker 1: allowed inside the hospital for fear of spreading the disease.
Speaker 1: Hospitals are trying to treat the minds and hearts of
Speaker 1: the healers, offering counseling, crisis hotlines and therapy dogs. I
Speaker 1: talked to Bloomberg's and a court about the scars. The
Speaker 1: pandemic is leaving on hospital workers and what the health
Speaker 1: care system can do about it. These people are going
Speaker 1: to work every day, you know. First of all, they're
Speaker 1: actually leaving to go to work, unlike a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are lucky enough to stay home. UM. And
Speaker 1: then they're really in sort of the center, the epicenter
Speaker 1: of this of this pandemic right there, seeing a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of human pain and grief. And they're also bearing
Speaker 1: the burden not just of treating a disease that we
Speaker 1: do not really understand, but they're also bearing the burden
Speaker 1: of knowing that they're kind of the soul, you know,
Speaker 1: representative of the patient. In this environment, people can't come
Speaker 1: in and see their family members because of how infectious
Speaker 1: this diseases are. Hospitals or other organizations, or even perhaps
Speaker 1: some healthcare workers themselves, are they spearheading efforts to provide say,
Speaker 1: more formal resources to two doctors or their other health
Speaker 1: care colleagues to say, um, cope with this kind of stress.
Speaker 1: So we spoke with a couple of different institutions that
Speaker 1: we're trying to offer better support to their providers. One
Speaker 1: of them was Mount Sinai here in New York, setting
Speaker 1: up a center to to screen and treat and study
Speaker 1: their healthcare workers, you know, difficult experiences through this UM.
Speaker 1: I spoke with Julie Beavers, who's a trauma and crisis
Speaker 1: chaplain who flew out here to New York from California
Speaker 1: to be a support and a resource and health counsel
Speaker 1: healthcare providers here on the front lines in New York.
Speaker 1: People are traumatized and also the healthcare workers are traumatized.
Speaker 1: This is not normal. This is not their normal. You know,
Speaker 1: put on your scribs and go to work. UM. When
Speaker 1: they go to work, they have more people to care
Speaker 1: for than might be humanly possible, right, and it's in
Speaker 1: situations that will not make sense to the training that
Speaker 1: they've had. Yes, they are experts and caring for people,
Speaker 1: and they know how to run ventilators, and they know
Speaker 1: how to you know, administer medications, and they know how
Speaker 1: to listen to people. These are ends. These nurses aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily trained to deliver death notifications, right. There's an art
Speaker 1: to that, and they're not trained for that, right. They're
Speaker 1: not used to UM dealing with you know, very critical
Speaker 1: patients and hearing the patient's phone ring. You know, these
Speaker 1: patients might have been just on the phone with their
Speaker 1: family members three hours ago and able to talk, and
Speaker 1: now they're on a ventilator and they may lose their
Speaker 1: life by the end of the day. And the nurses
Speaker 1: are answering some of these phone calls and um, you
Speaker 1: know that's not part of their training, right, an important
Speaker 1: thing to think about in an availability of all these resources.
Speaker 1: Healthcare workers have so much going on at work right now.
Speaker 1: They're working incredibly long shifts. They don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of free time, and they're sad and they're scared, and
Speaker 1: they go home and all they have time to do
Speaker 1: is really eat and sleep. Right, And now we're saying
Speaker 1: in your free time you need to you know, talk
Speaker 1: to counselor about this. Now that that's something that I
Speaker 1: think would be challenging for anyone. But I also spoke
Speaker 1: with a lot of experts who said, you know, there's
Speaker 1: an additional kind of culture here in the in the
Speaker 1: medical field, and especially I think among physicians, of you know,
Speaker 1: we are the helpers, right, We don't need to help,
Speaker 1: we help other people. For a lot of them, it
Speaker 1: can be easy to say, you know, I'm fine, I'm
Speaker 1: doing fine. You know, I have my friends, I have
Speaker 1: my family. I talked to other doctors about this. I'm fine,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's a real concern that if healthcare
Speaker 1: providers don't take advantage of these resources or don't seek
Speaker 1: support in some way, that there will be kind of
Speaker 1: long lasting scars. It's almost inevitable. I think if you
Speaker 1: think about this, the scale of this pandemic and the
Speaker 1: scale of human suffering that healthcare providers are seeing on
Speaker 1: the job every day. I was thing we might dig
Speaker 1: into Julie Beaver's story a little bit more um because,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, she had recently arrived in New York.
Speaker 1: She's working as a chaplain, and I was hoping you might,
Speaker 1: you know, give us a bit of a like a
Speaker 1: pain as a picture essentially of how she has been
Speaker 1: um engaging with healthcare workers and you know, some of
Speaker 1: the things that she's seen in her her daily experience
Speaker 1: working as a chaplain with doctors or other workers either
Speaker 1: experiencing burnout or just this kind of incredible pressures. Julie
Speaker 1: Beaver's normally lives, you know, out in California and Sacramento,
Speaker 1: and she flew um here to New York to volunteer
Speaker 1: kind of to help frontline healthcare workers with exactly some
Speaker 1: of the things we've been talking about here, right, with
Speaker 1: the sort of trauma and the difficulty of this job.
Speaker 1: And you know, something that is really interesting about her
Speaker 1: experience is she's living in one of these hotels that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of healthcare workers living in these hotels
Speaker 1: kind of being busted over to the hospitals that they're
Speaker 1: working at, you know, each day. And so she really
Speaker 1: structures her day around when the health care providers are,
Speaker 1: you know, leaving for the day for the day shift
Speaker 1: and coming back from an evening shift, just sort of saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm here for you. I'm here for you. You can
Speaker 1: talk to me. Here's my card. I want to set
Speaker 1: them up for success going forward. Um. You know, it's
Speaker 1: very common for them to have nightmares. It's very common
Speaker 1: for them to you know, go back to their room
Speaker 1: and spend the day rehashing their shift instead of sleeping. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: The thing that makes this so much like war is
Speaker 1: that this isn't a one time trauma for them. You know,
Speaker 1: It's not like somebody that has experienced finding a loved one,
Speaker 1: you know, that has died by suicide in their home
Speaker 1: or something like that where it's a one time, very
Speaker 1: traumatic event. These healthcare workers are experiencing traumatic events throughout
Speaker 1: their twelve hour shift, and and they come back and
Speaker 1: they try to get some sleep, and then they gear
Speaker 1: up and go again and again and again and again.
Speaker 1: That was Bloomberg's and the Court, and that's our show today.
Speaker 1: For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus
Speaker 1: around the world, visit bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and
Speaker 1: if you like the show, please leave us a review
Speaker 1: and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the
Speaker 1: best way to help more listeners find our global reporting.
Speaker 1: The Prognosis Daily edition is hosted by Me Laura Carlson.
Speaker 1: The show was produced by Me top foreheads, Jordan Gospore
Speaker 1: and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court.
Speaker 1: Original music by Leo Sidran. Our editors are Francesco Leavi
Speaker 1: and Rick Shawine. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.