The coronavirus pandemic has us all asking a lot of questions: How long will I have to practice “social distancing”? Will there be a cure for COVID-19? Can I ever touch my face again?
WABE health reporter Sam Whitehead and guests will try to answer those questions. He’ll talk with experts, public officials, journalists, and everyday people about how the coronavirus is affecting their lives.
Since March of 2020, we've been bringing you different perspectives on living through and understanding the coronavirus pandemic. Today, host Sam Whitehead sits in the interview chair to share some of the things he's learned. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dave O'Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says there's lots of disagreement among scientists about the value of COVID-19 booster shots even as federal regulators make recommendations for them. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Kimberly Manning, an internist at Grady Memorial Hospital, says giving people a space to share their concerns about COVID-19 vaccines can make them more confident in getting them. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Joe Bresee, with the Task Force for Global Health, shares how the nonprofit's work on standing up influenza vaccination programs equip it to help countries establish COVID-19 vaccination programs. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week, we held a special live taping of the podcast with Dr. Lilly Cheng Immergluck, Immergluck, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Morehouse School of Medicine, and Dr. Audrey Arona, who leads the Gwinnett, Newton, and Rockdale health district. The conversation focused on some of the challenges ahead and even some reasons for optimism. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Cecile Viboud, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health who helps run the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, joins me to talk about the latest projections from the group, which show the pandemic slowing down in the next few months. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sarah Jane Tribble, with Kaiser Health News, says top U.S. scientists started talking seriously about COVID-19 booster shots in January, at a time when many Americans hadn't received their first vaccine doses. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Lawrence Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law. says there's a long history of vaccine mandates in the U.S. that have paved the way for those President Biden recently announced. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Becky Sayler has three kids in elementary school in the Cobb County School District. Within the first week of school one of them contracted COVID-19. She shares how her family has been navigating the situation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Carlos del Rio, infectious diseases specialist at Emory University, says low vaccination rates and the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus are to blame for the current wave of COVID-19 pandemic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
N.R. is an emergency room physician at a large hospital in metro Atlanta. He shares his experiences dealing with the current wave of the pandemic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Robert Jansen, chief medical officer of the Grady Health System, which runs Georgia's largest hospital, says the current wave of the pandemic could soon be as large at the one that swamped health care facilities this winter. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Over the course of the pandemic, many communities have turned to the non-profit group CORE for help with COVID-19 testing and vaccination. Ann Lee, CEO of CORE discusses that work. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says even fully vaccinated people can spread the coronavirus. That's based on new research on the high-transmissible delta variant. Dr. Colleen Kraft, and infectious diseases physician and researcher at Emory University, helps unpack what that means for the pandemic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
U.S. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are pushing a plan to create a federal Medicaid look-alike program to extend health coverage to low income Georgians. Both say the plan was inspired, in part, by the pandemic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Christopher Wimer, co-director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, says the expanded child tax credit payments going out to families in July could dramatically reduce child poverty in the country. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. David Brett-Major, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, says we're still learning a lot about how and why the delta variant of the coronavirus is so troublesome. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, says the pandemic has brought some big changes to the workplace, though it's unclear which will persist. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Since March of 2020, we've brought you scores of conversations about different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, we're doing something a little different. Health reporter Sam Whitehead plays the guest and answer questions about the origins of the show and what's coming next. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Joshua Weitz, a quantitative biologist at Georgia Tech, says some two-thirds of Georgians could have some immune protection against the coronavirus, either through vaccination or natural infection. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at the Rockefeller University, says it's not uncommon for people to get infected by a virus even once they've been vaccinated against it, but that doesn't mean a vaccine isn't working. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Liz Hamel, director of public opinion at the Kaiser Family Foundation, says attitudes on COVID-19 vaccines have changed a good bit over the course of the vaccine rollout. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Wendy Armstrong, medical director of Grady Health System's HIV clinic, says a plan to end the HIV epidemic by 2030 was already ambitious, but COVID-19 has made the effort even harder. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Melanie Thompson, an HIV researcher and physician in Atlanta, says COVID-19 and HIV has exposed similar inequities in the U.S.. She says the fight against one pandemic can teach us things about addressing the other. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Carl Zimmer, a columnist for the New York Times, says some scientists think the theory that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab is unlikely but still deserving of investigation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Julie Rosenberg, with Ariadne Labs and the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University, says the spread of the coronavirus around the world could have major implications for the future of the pandemic in the U.S.. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Roxane Silver, a psychologist at UC-Irvine, says living though the many traumatic events of the last 18 months could better prepare some for the stresses of the future. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Roxanne Scott, who covers immigration for WABE, says detention centers run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement haven't been spared by COVID-19 and shares the story of a former detainee. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Evan Anderson, a physician and researcher at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, says finding a COVID-19 vaccine that's safe and effective in young children is crucial for ending the pandemic. He's working on clinical trials of Moderna's vaccine in kids 6 months through 11 years old. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, shares her thoughts on the vaccine rollout in the South and across the U.S. and on where the pandemic goes from here. We also check in with Dr. Kathleen Toomey, head of the Georgia Department of Public Health. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
