Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's been one year
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, and in that
Speaker 1: time our lives have changed dramatically. The virus has imposed disease, death,
Speaker 1: and loss on the US and the world. It forced
Speaker 1: sweeping changes to daily life almost overnight. For this special
Speaker 1: episode of Prognosis, Bloomberg reporters Emma Court and Nick Corrello
Speaker 1: spoke with people across the US about what this last
Speaker 1: year has been like for them and how things could
Speaker 1: change moving forward. Here's Emma. A year ago, my day
Speaker 1: would start with a train ride alongside thousands of fellow
Speaker 1: commuters into Manhattan. Once I got to work, I might
Speaker 1: get pulled into a meeting or two, or have lunch
Speaker 1: with a source. I would grab coffee with a colleague,
Speaker 1: and after work get dinner with friends. In other words,
Speaker 1: it was all pretty normal. Because I write about healthcare.
Speaker 1: The novel Coronavirus had been on my radar and in
Speaker 1: my reporting for weeks. At that point, still, the infectious
Speaker 1: disease seemed far away, at a remove from daily life.
Speaker 1: That changed suddenly one Thursday morning. The train cars were
Speaker 1: emptier than ever before hours later, city and state politicians
Speaker 1: declared a state of emergency and put restrictions on gatherings.
Speaker 1: New York City bround to a halt. Now my commute
Speaker 1: is from one room of my apartment to another. Zoom
Speaker 1: calls have replaced meeting rooms, and after work plans involved
Speaker 1: watching my house plants to grow. The piece of work
Speaker 1: and life has slowed, even stalled. Everyone has experienced something
Speaker 1: like this over the last year, a dramatic shift in
Speaker 1: the way we work, live, and spend time with our families.
Speaker 1: We've been collecting stories for the past few months about
Speaker 1: this change, and we want to share them with you
Speaker 1: as the pandemic enters. It's one year anniversary. I'm Suzanne
Speaker 1: Evans Wagner. My name is Betsy Sneller. Wagner and Sneller
Speaker 1: are both professors of linguistics at Michigan State University. So
Speaker 1: the Machiane Diaries project came about as a way to
Speaker 1: test what the effects of the pandemic will be on
Speaker 1: language for speakers in Michigan. So getting these to audio
Speaker 1: diaries where people just tell us about their day or
Speaker 1: their week is really rich data. You know, the mundane
Speaker 1: ways that life has been changing is really valuable for
Speaker 1: us when we're going to go analyze how their language
Speaker 1: has been changing. At the beginning of the pandemic, nobody
Speaker 1: knew what to call it. We didn't even know what
Speaker 1: to call it. Participants themselves were calling it anything from
Speaker 1: the current situation to Miss Rhona, to Rhona to coronavirus,
Speaker 1: to COVID nineteen to the pandemic um. And one thing
Speaker 1: that we found in our diary entries is that as
Speaker 1: time went on, the whole community kind of settled in on, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're just going to call it the pandemic. That's the
Speaker 1: term that we're gonna land on. So one thing to
Speaker 1: know is that lexical items words to describe things. Lexical
Speaker 1: items change a lot, especially when there's a new thing
Speaker 1: that occurs, and we saw this at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the pandemic, particularly that there was kind of this explosion
Speaker 1: of new terms, maskal um, quarantine, e, all of these
Speaker 1: different terms related to like, oh, we're doing like zoom
Speaker 1: happy hour, things like that Baker's hotline. This is Amanda,
Speaker 1: how can I help you? My name is Amanda Schlaram
Speaker 1: and I'm a I'm a shift lead on the Baker's
Speaker 1: hotline as well as the customer support side too. What
Speaker 1: I basically do is, um, I answer a lot of questions,
Speaker 1: some of the some of the bigger questions that come
Speaker 1: in about orders when I'm doing Baker's hotline things. I
Speaker 1: definitely take calls for baking fiascos and and such and
Speaker 1: how I try to help trouble shoot that. Usually this
Speaker 1: time of year spring, like going into spring late winter,
Speaker 1: we kind of slow down. We still get a fair
Speaker 1: amount of calls, but it's not as crazy as like
Speaker 1: holiday where everyone's baking for the holidays, and like we
Speaker 1: came in and it was our phones were just just wild.
Speaker 1: Like it was, you know, twenty calls holding and everyone
Speaker 1: is asking what kind of flower they can use? You know,
Speaker 1: they're making sour dough. How do they do that? Um?
Speaker 1: What can they feed their sour dough because they don't
Speaker 1: have the kind of flower we're suggesting it. Definitely, it
Speaker 1: was almost an overnight change, Like it was so fast.
Speaker 1: Anxieties were definitely running pretty high. People would say, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't find bread, so I'm now going to have
Speaker 1: to make all of my bread, and so then they'd
Speaker 1: want you to walk them through how to do that,
Speaker 1: like how exactly to make a loaf of bread and
Speaker 1: so um. I do think there is definitely a lot
Speaker 1: of panic going on and then just overreaction too small
Speaker 1: baking problems that we would definitely talk them down and
Speaker 1: be like, like, you got this, you can do this.
Speaker 1: It's not going to be it's not going to be
Speaker 1: the end of the world. We feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of our calls are a lot longer now because people
Speaker 1: are either lonely or they're tired of talking to the
Speaker 1: people in their house or whatever, because they they just
Speaker 1: started talking to us about everything. So it's it's definitely
Speaker 1: kind of learning how people deal with fuel of things
Speaker 1: has been interesting for me definitely. My name is Mike Builder.
Speaker 1: I'm the CEO of jack Box Games UM. Jack Box
Speaker 1: Games is a independent developer and publisher. We make party
Speaker 1: games that you play on your television, but then you
Speaker 1: use your mobile phone to uh to join them and play.
Speaker 1: And they saw a really huge spike in gameplay and
Speaker 1: interest and trafficked our website um purchase of the game games.
Speaker 1: People usually play Jackbox games when they were together in
Speaker 1: the same room with a game up on a TV screen,
Speaker 1: but that also changed during the pandemic. So people realized
Speaker 1: pretty quickly under the pandemic that that you could launched
Speaker 1: the game on your computer, have a zoom call, and
Speaker 1: just share the screen of the game and still have
Speaker 1: a really fun party environment, a social interaction with a
Speaker 1: ton of people over VidCon, as if you were sitting
Speaker 1: in the same room together playing a party. When we
Speaker 1: were seeing this kind of interest in tracking happening in
Speaker 1: March and April last year, I mean that was a
Speaker 1: huge eye opener to us, like something unique is happening here.
Speaker 1: And you know, prior to quarantine, and and you know,
Speaker 1: people staying at home, UM, people would play our games
Speaker 1: over VidCon. I think entertainment as a whole has has
Speaker 1: you know, aside from maybe the box office, home entertainment
Speaker 1: U has definitely seen quite a boost out of this
Speaker 1: home quarantine. UM. People are looking for escaped as them.
Speaker 1: They want to watch TV, they want to play video games,
Speaker 1: they want to be entertained, they want to be taken
Speaker 1: out of their their quarantine moment um. And so my industry, beat,
Speaker 1: the video game industry has benefited from that. Here's Betsy
Speaker 1: Sneller from the Michigan Diaries project again at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, it was kind of new and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, people would say, oh, I saw this new
Speaker 1: sign the neighborhood park is closed, or this new thing happened,
Speaker 1: and there was a lot to talk about. Kind of
Speaker 1: starting in August September, um, people were feeling sad. So
Speaker 1: we have a lot of diary entries. I actually have
Speaker 1: people saying this is really boring. You guys are going
Speaker 1: to be really bored, and then in the background there's
Speaker 1: these big other things happening in the world. August, people
Speaker 1: were also thinking about back to school season and wondering
Speaker 1: whether kids would be able to go back. In person,
Speaker 1: I feel like people are going to be sick of
Speaker 1: go they not know that they're sick. Okay, and the
Speaker 1: mask sometimes I can't really heal with the mass, but
Speaker 1: I can't I can't really hear from mask that well.
Speaker 1: So what kind of things that do you think that
Speaker 1: you could do to be safe if we have to
Speaker 1: go back to school on the ball? Social distance? Social distance?
Speaker 1: Do you think that might be hard at school? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've also been trying to think of like stuff that
Speaker 1: make my zoom meeting battle and stuff, because when you're
Speaker 1: at school, it's kind of boring. So I so some
Speaker 1: of the things that I'm going to do is that
Speaker 1: I'm gonna use slime and I got some signs for
Speaker 1: my birthday, so I'm definitely going to be playing with
Speaker 1: that obviously, not like make a huge mess, but like
Speaker 1: away from the computer. But I'm going to just kind
Speaker 1: of be playing with a party or something just because
Speaker 1: that's a fun thing or like I I've just been
Speaker 1: that way. I don't get really, boy, do you mean
Speaker 1: because it's kind of boring. My name is Dr Jesse Gold.
Speaker 1: I'm a psychiatrist and I see healthcare professionals and college students,
Speaker 1: and I work in St. Louis, Missouri at Washington University
Speaker 1: in St. Louis, where I'm an assistant professor and director
Speaker 1: of Wellness Engagement and Outreach. I think people are definitely
Speaker 1: sicker than maybe they were before UM. At the beginning
Speaker 1: of the pandemic. I think we had a lull where
Speaker 1: people were sort of adjusting to the new normal, kind
Speaker 1: of in this fight or flight mode where they were
Speaker 1: just kind of I think you would just say, like
Speaker 1: making sure they had food, making sure they had water,
Speaker 1: making sure everything was safe and they didn't even really
Speaker 1: think about their mental health. And even at the beginning
Speaker 1: we were sort of like, I guess we don't have
Speaker 1: that many patients were okay, And then it took off
Speaker 1: pretty quickly, and especially in healthcare workers, where what they're
Speaker 1: doing day to day has been so different and not
Speaker 1: at all what they're used to. You know, health care
Speaker 1: workers in general, when they sign on to do what
Speaker 1: they do, I didn't really think that they could get
Speaker 1: sick themselves or bring home the illness to family members,
Speaker 1: and so that's a big change. They maybe would see
Speaker 1: one person die a shift, if any, and have seen
Speaker 1: just people dying and dying and dying. So I had
Speaker 1: a patient that is really struggling tell me that it has.
Speaker 1: She had called twenty places to try to get a
Speaker 1: therapist and nobody had openings. And I could like feel
Speaker 1: my body physically sink when she said that, and I
Speaker 1: was really just taken aback by that. And I know
Speaker 1: very much that it's also not the therapist's fault, and
Speaker 1: that I've been talking to therapists a lot and they're
Speaker 1: really struggling. They they also have been taking extra sessions,
Speaker 1: working on weekends, taking their old clients back doing all
Speaker 1: of this extra stuff that you know, it's like flipping
Speaker 1: over backwards to do as much as they can to
Speaker 1: accommodate more and more people to fill in the broken
Speaker 1: gaps of the system. But the system still can't fit
Speaker 1: all of these people, and they're still calling twenty people. Right.
Speaker 1: I've would have told you before COVID that I probably
Speaker 1: had ten patients or something that I would go to
Speaker 1: sleep and worry about of my like hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: or so. You know, it's not the case anymore. It's
Speaker 1: much closer to like over half of them. I would say,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, part of that is that you're
Speaker 1: not seeing movement on them improving, and whether that's you know,
Speaker 1: the men's not working and so you want to change it,
Speaker 1: or whether that's you can't medicate away a pandemic and
Speaker 1: you can't medicate away grief, and you can't medicate away
Speaker 1: job loss and schooling from home and work from home
Speaker 1: and all of this stuff compounding. Here's another Michigan Diaries
Speaker 1: recording about that. I'm just struggling in general with COVID
Speaker 1: right now because there are a lot of things I
Speaker 1: haven't processed, Like it's just everything has been so heavy,
Speaker 1: like it's it's first of all, really hard for me
Speaker 1: to be UM so isolated from people, Like I never
Speaker 1: thought of myth as a social person, but during COVID
Speaker 1: I've realized I still need that contact with people and um,
Speaker 1: you know, just seeing my friends in person. So that's
Speaker 1: been a real struggle for me. UM And so I
Speaker 1: guess I just really haven't been processing things well, like
Speaker 1: just not working through my emotions with that are thinking
Speaker 1: about it a lot. Plenty of people also weren't working
Speaker 1: from home this last year, including at pharmaceutical companies where
Speaker 1: employees were busier than ever. Here's Stefan von Sell, the
Speaker 1: chief executive officer of Maderna. So we were made aware
Speaker 1: of the virus between Christmas and New Year of UH.
Speaker 1: We got the sequence from the Chinese government in January,
Speaker 1: the tenth put online. By the thirteen of January, we
Speaker 1: had the vaccine design lockdown on the computer. It was
Speaker 1: all in Silico. We never touched the physical virus. Forty
Speaker 1: two days after the team ship to v N I
Speaker 1: h the vaccine and on March I think the thirteen
Speaker 1: we started over sixteen. We started dozing UH. In the
Speaker 1: first phase one at the NA h Uh. July July
Speaker 1: we started the phase three and December eighteen the vaccine
Speaker 1: was authorized by the FD. So in eleven months we
Speaker 1: went from nothing, not even knowing the sequence of this virus,
Speaker 1: to getting an authorized vaccine. How could you develop a
Speaker 1: vaccine so fast? I think it's the question, and I
Speaker 1: think there's a few things. Because we're in the pandemic,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of cases. You need people to
Speaker 1: get sick, and fortunate me to compare to people who
Speaker 1: got placebo. When we inject the money in people's arm,
Speaker 1: we never give them a drug. We give them an instruction,
Speaker 1: set a piece of code, a piece of software for
Speaker 1: your body to read that instruction and to make, in
Speaker 1: this case, the spect protein of a coronavirus. And when
Speaker 1: you're gonna make a spect protein yourself in your body, well,
Speaker 1: your immune system is going to see that protein, which
Speaker 1: is not natural, it's not a human protein in your body,
Speaker 1: and so humane system is going to be upset and
Speaker 1: it's gonna make antibodies so that if later you get
Speaker 1: a natural infection of the sascovi too virus, you will
Speaker 1: already have antibody in your body that will bind to
Speaker 1: the virus, neutralize it and so it will prevent it
Speaker 1: from getting inside yourselves to self replicate and make you sick.
Speaker 1: So was a historic here in terms of getting a
Speaker 1: money as a first approved product. A few people were
Speaker 1: even aware of what the money is even in the
Speaker 1: farmer industry. And I think the world in the next
Speaker 1: you know Moss waters and els, He's going to start
Speaker 1: mine well to see the benefit that that people are
Speaker 1: going to get from many many amany drugs coming to them.
Speaker 1: My name is Nita Kadeer. I am a pulmonary critical
Speaker 1: care physician at U c l A. I'm the co
Speaker 1: director of the medical I See you and I was
Speaker 1: the co director for the critical care COVID efforts at
Speaker 1: U c l A Health busin last year. So I
Speaker 1: take care of patients when they are critically ill and
Speaker 1: a native intensive care. I also see them in my
Speaker 1: follow up clinic um patients who have um them being
Speaker 1: patients who have survived critical illness and are coming back
Speaker 1: from follow up. The mainstay of treating ARID s and
Speaker 1: treating COVID is still good supportive care. Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we are running to the bedside with a crash cart.
Speaker 1: Absolutely we're doing that, but yes, a lot of it
Speaker 1: is preventing complications. So I think supportive care doesn't think
Speaker 1: that it's due because they people hear it and they
Speaker 1: think it means like chicken soup and naps, you know.
Speaker 1: But a supportive care and the IIC you essentially amounts
Speaker 1: to supporting the body, often withinvasive measures UM and giving
Speaker 1: time for healing and avoiding complications while you are supporting
Speaker 1: the body with these invasive measures and UM. It's that
Speaker 1: still I think sounds much more simple than it is,
Speaker 1: but it is actually quite a bit of work. I
Speaker 1: don't think survival is talked about enough UM, and I
Speaker 1: I do think there's far too much talk about death.
Speaker 1: And this is not to discount death and the over
Speaker 1: half a million deaths that our country has experienced over
Speaker 1: the past year UM. But there are many more people
Speaker 1: who will survive than who will die, and we need
Speaker 1: to know how to take care of those patients. UM.
Speaker 1: We need to know what to expect. So UM, when
Speaker 1: people UM survive in I c U hospitalization, whether it's
Speaker 1: from COVID or from any other critical illness UM, there
Speaker 1: the road to recovery can be long. It is not
Speaker 1: always for everybody, but it frequently is long you don't
Speaker 1: you don't leave the i CU the way you went in.
Speaker 1: UM that that is certainly fair to say so. UM.
Speaker 1: Sometimes patients go from the ice U to the medical
Speaker 1: ward to home, but more frequently UM in the setting
Speaker 1: of needing, you know, needing to be on invasive mechanical ventilation,
Speaker 1: needing to be on event later there are psychologic issues
Speaker 1: that they can experience, so anxiety depression PTSD or not
Speaker 1: uncommon in the post i c U population. UM. There
Speaker 1: there's also a lot of a lot of muscular weakness
Speaker 1: from inactivity, which is one of the big reasons patients
Speaker 1: need to go to rehabilitation afterwards. My goal initially in
Speaker 1: the pandemic was just like really trying to lift everyone's spirits,
Speaker 1: like just go in. It's like I would joke that
Speaker 1: I would go into the ice U with the energy
Speaker 1: of hypeman at a hip hop show, like just try
Speaker 1: to get people like repped up, like we're gonna do this.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get people through this, and it's gonna suck,
Speaker 1: but but we're gonna get we're gonna save some lives
Speaker 1: and we're gonna be okay. And that level of energy
Speaker 1: and enthusiasm. It's just really difficult to sustain over months
Speaker 1: and months and months, and while we were all working
Speaker 1: so hard and have seen some difficult things. So in
Speaker 1: the fall things sort of started dying down and we
Speaker 1: thought the worst was over, and then December and January
Speaker 1: happened and it was I mean, whatever little surge we
Speaker 1: had in UM in the spring summer, it was nothing
Speaker 1: compared to December and January. In December and January we
Speaker 1: had to pull in multiple backup teams for quite a
Speaker 1: long period of time. We had COVID patients in many
Speaker 1: I see U s UM. We were using non I
Speaker 1: c U spaces and converted those two I see you spaces.
Speaker 1: That was That was pretty rough, because a lot of
Speaker 1: fatigue had said it at that point, and it just
Speaker 1: had gotten a whole lot worse. Things have gotten better
Speaker 1: over the last few weeks, though, I will say considerably better.
Speaker 1: I certainly did not anticipate that would be dealing with
Speaker 1: this a year later. I absolutely did not. I remember
Speaker 1: one of my friends said that back in the spring.
Speaker 1: She said, I don't think that's gonna be over until
Speaker 1: we have a vaccine, And I was like, no, that
Speaker 1: that just that can't be true. It's gonna be a
Speaker 1: few months of it's going to be horrible and then
Speaker 1: it's going to get gradually better. And I mean, and
Speaker 1: she was absolutely right, because here we are a year later, um,
Speaker 1: and still dealing with it all um, and at least
Speaker 1: we have a vaccine now. But that was the first
Speaker 1: major glimmer of hope for me. This is finally a
Speaker 1: real signal that there's an end in sight. That was
Speaker 1: Emma Court, with additional reporting by Nick Carrello. For more
Speaker 1: coverage of the Pandemics anniversary, visit bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus.
Speaker 1: The Prognosis podcast is produced by Tophor foreheads Magnus Henrickson
Speaker 1: and me Laura Carlson. Our editors are Rick Shine and
Speaker 1: Francesco Levi. Additional help for this episode came from Stephen Merrilman.
Speaker 1: Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: l