Transmission

A year ago, Dr. Nick Mark worried he might not survive the pandemic. He's a critical-care doctor in Seattle who performs risky procedures, like intubations, on some of the sickest COVID-19 patients. He and his colleagues updated their wills and made sure their life insurance premiums were paid automatically.

Now that most students are back in school in the Northwest, there are a lot of feelings going around. 

Many parents have watched their children struggle to learn from a screen. A lot of kids have become depressed, isolated and disengaged this past year. 

On the day I meet 86-year-old Chris Swanson inside her room at Horizon House in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood, it feels like a party. 

“Yay for family!” says Swanson with a smile. 

When 65-year-old Bonnie McGuire was vaccinated earlier this year for COVID-19, a huge weight of worry disappeared in an instant. 

“I felt amazingly serene," she says. "It was a strange feeling. I've never had this experience, and none of us in this country ever have, where this shot will keep you, you know, you will not die on a ventilator alone in a hospital – with this one little jab in your arm. It's startling the simplicity of that." 

Emergencies do something to our brains. A few months after a catastrophe, people find themselves more irritable and less able to concentrate. Rates of depression and anxiety rise. Same with substance use and suicide. This has been observed in disaster after disaster. 

In fact there are three distinct phases: the honeymoon phase, the disillusionment phase and the recovery phase. People who lived through Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 know what all of this feels like.

Living during a global pandemic is inherently stressful. Stress can negatively impact how we make decisions.

“And so when people are feeling that stress, then cortisol floods their brain, and it really impairs people's ability to process information," says Meredith Li-Vollmer, a risk communicator at Public Health — Seattle & King County.

It’s been about one month since the first coronavirus vaccine arrived in Washington state. Residents, some of them in tears, watched a nurse receive the first injection. This event was supposed to herald the beginning of the end of the coronavirus pandemic.

But, since then, the vaccine rollout has progressed more slowly than some had hoped. More than 600,000 doses have arrived in Washington, but only about a third of those have been administered.

The beard is real. The suit is red. And he's separated from his guests by several feet and plexiglass. We meet Santas intent on creating memories, even in a pandemic. Note: This episode is especially appealing to those who appreciate the sounds of squealing children.

The coronavirus pandemic is testing our society’s safety net in ways we never imagined. There are millions of people across the country and thousands in Washington state who are unable to keep up with their rent.

College, in the minds of many incoming freshmen, is about so much more than education. It’s supposed to be a formative experience that creates lifelong memories and lifelong friendships, an adventure that sets the stage for the rest of your life.

But what if your freshman year coincides with a pandemic?

Things are getting a little scary out there. The number of new coronavirus cases is on the rise. Hospital beds are filling up across the country. Deaths are climbing. Sobering stuff. 

As we wait for the approval of vaccines, development and testing of better treatments is crucial. Effective therapies don’t get as much attention, but they are just as important in making this disease less deadly. This is what we’re talking about in the latest episode of Transmission.

Now that we are several months into this pandemic, we are entering a phase that many doctors and researchers are worried about. Let’s take a look at where things stand.

In March of this year, as the novel coronavirus started to take hold of the region, students and teachers were notified that in person school was over and remote learning would get underway. At first, everyone thought the move to online learning would be temporary, but it wasn’t.

It’s been more than five months since the nation’s first novel coronavirus death happened, right here in the Seattle area.

Now, more than 100 vaccine candidates are being developed, and dozens have entered the human-trial stage. But they’re likely still a long way off from mass production and distribution.

In this episode of Transmission, host Gabriel Spitzer and producer Jennifer Wing discuss how the RNA vaccine works and why some elements of vaccine development are going so much more quickly than usual.

Tammy Edwards survived COVID-19. It was miserable, but she made it. She had hoped that once the virus ran its course, she could then get back to her life and her work as a nurse in Tacoma. 

Federal guidelines suggest a typical person sick with COVID should get better after a week or two. Tammy Edwards is three months past that point, and she is still recovering. 

Imagine getting out of prison after almost two decades, and being released into … this.

That’s what was on Jennifer Tilford’s mind as she stood in the parking lot at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, waiting for the man she’s been married to for three years, but has never been alone with.

Life for both of them is about to change radically.

“There is no normal and there's not going to be the same normal ever again,” Jennifer said. “Not only because Jason's coming home, but because of the whole virus.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic landed in Washington, the economic fallout has driven more than a million people in the state to apply for unemployment insurance. 

Those payments have become the safety net for workers during the worst recession in many decades. The federal government beefed it up significantly in the CARES Act — a recognition of how urgent the situation is for tens of millions of Americans. 

But now, after weeks and, in some cases, months out of work, large numbers of unemployed Washingtonians still have not gotten paid. 

A lot of us this year have gotten used to relying on computer models for projections of how many new COVID-19 cases we can expect, or when the economy might start to rebound. But those models can’t tell us how we’re going to feel, or how lockdown and grief and social breakdown will change the way we see and experience the world. 

Well, turns out there’s a model for that, too. 

We are a country wracked by illness, by economic crisis, and by tears in our social fabric that have existed all along, but are too gaping to ignore, once again. 

How do we think about these twin emergencies — the pandemic, and the spasm of grief and anger over racism and police violence? What lessons could history possibly teach us about such an unprecedented situation?

In many ways, “family planning” is a misnomer. The “planning” part only goes so far. Even with all the tools at your disposal, a lot of it is mostly out of your control and up to chance. A million little things have to go exactly right to bring life into the world. 

When you throw a global pandemic into the equation, the typical uncertainty that comes with starting a family is amplified to tremendous proportions. 

In this episode of Transmission, we explore how the response to COVID-19 has altered the lives of growing families. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, some clear patterns have emerged. One is that people of color are being affected by this virus at higher rates than white people. 

In Washington state, the disparities are especially stark among the Latino population.

More than a third of the state's COVID-19 cases have been Latino, which is way out of proportion to their 13 percent share of the general population.

COVID-era isolation affects all of us. And for people with special needs, it brings all sorts of particular challenges, many that can’t be solved with a Zoom call.

That’s why most days, you can find a bald, heavily tattooed guy, salt-and-pepper beard down to his sternum and wearing a bright blue face mask, driving around Western Washington to check in on his clients — all adults with developmental disabilities.

“I call it my ‘Melissa outreach,’” says Gino Jevdjevich, a crisis counselor with the nonprofit Sound Health. “Melissa Ethridge, she has a song, ‘Come To My Window.’ I started joking about that song at the beginning, but now I call it my ‘Melissa outreach.’”

There is a lot to worry about right now: our jobs and our health. How will we be able to make next month’s rent or mortgage payment? Then there is the bigger question — will life ever be the same again? 

But, even though we are living in unprecedented and scary times, there is still room for laughter. There is still a lot to smile about and be grateful for. 

What are your moments of joy? This is the question we are asking today on Transmission. 

Telling stories live is both the oldest form of entertainment, probably, and a newish thriving art form. In the Pacific Northwest there are a whole range of storytelling series and events. These usually happen in a smallish venue, maybe a coffee shop. 

And needless to say, that’s been interrupted. 

We explore the power of the antibody — a protein that our blood cells make when our body encounters a virus.

Scientists have known for more than 100 years that if you take antibodies from someone who has recovered from a virus and transfer plasma, a blood byproduct, from that person to someone who is sick with that same virus, the patient will usually fare better than someone who doesn’t get this extra help.

Today’s episode: Learning as we go. 

The thing that makes COVID-19 so tricky is its newness. It’s a disease that literally did not exist in humans until a few months ago. There was no handbook for treating it, no established way to screen for it and, as has become painfully clear, no detailed protocols for how doctors should handle the waves of sick patients. 

That has meant that health workers at virtually every point on the spectrum — from paramedics to primary-care doctors to ICU specialists — have had to learn on the fly. 

Today’s episode: Confronting Mortality. 

This is not something a lot of us are used to thinking much about. Dreading, sure. Avoiding, you bet. But thinking hard about it, and what it means during a time like this — not easy. 

In this episode, we connect with people who have gotten intimate with mortality. 

Today's episode: The Virus-Eye View. 

We know, more or less, what the new coronavirus looks like … but what do we look like to it? 

In today’s episode, we imagine a little movie filmed from the point of view of the virus itself. We follow it as it enters the body, and get the blow-by-blow as it goes about its dastardly business of locking on to a cell, invading it, taking over its machinery and turning it into a virus factory. 

And we hear about an especially diabolical trick the virus pulls on its way out of a cell, which still gives me the creeps. 

Today’s episode: Saying Goodbye.

When a person infected with COVID-19 dies, those precious final moments aren’t spent with loved ones at their bedside. They’re spent surrounded by doctors and nurses, dressed head to toe in protective gear.

One nurse at a hospital in Issaquah, east of Seattle, wanted to do what she could to connect a mother and daughter one last time.

Using FaceTime, Tatyana Huber held her personal cellphone up to Carolann Gann’s face, so her daughter could share her final message of love and forgiveness.

Today’s episode: Getting Creative. 

There’s a bunch of psychological research out there that suggests constraints — having your choices limited — actually promotes creativity. 

And we’re all seeing now how being stuck at home, or losing your job, or having your kids out of school — it sucks, but it can also nudge us to find innovative solutions. 

Today we have a bunch of stories of how people are adapting to this less-than-ideal situation.