[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. All right, let's see what we got with citizen epidemiology. Where do you think you got COVID in the last month? 646-435-7280. Zack in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Zack.

Zack: Hi, how are you?

Brian: Good. You got a story?

Zack: I was down in Mexico for my brother's birthday. We went down to Tulum, it was five of us. While we were there, there was a festival happening called Art With Me, which was kind of like a Burning Man adjacent festival. We weren't part of it or anything but we did meet a lot of people who were at the festival and it certainly seemed like a super spreader event. It was packed.

Then when we get home, my friend George, he tested positive, and luckily, none of us had any other symptoms or tested positive. I have antibodies myself because I had it back in March early on, but I did a test to see what happens. Yes, Art With Me in Tulum, it seemed like nobody was wearing masks. It was interesting the people there for the festival weren't wearing masks while most of the locals in Tulum and Playa Del Carmen, were wearing masks.

Brian: You're calling out that festival but I'm not clear you did not get it because you already had it, right?

Zack: I didn't get it. but a friend of mine who I was with got it.

Brian: That's that's it. A friend of yours got it. Thank you very much. In fact, one more thing on that just on citizen epidemiology, that festival I'm guessing was entirely outdoors. Oh, he's gone already. Okay, my fault. Fred in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Fred.

Fred: Hi, Brian. Thank you for having me on again. Big fan. This is a story about my daughter. About two weeks ago, she was covering the story for her master's in journalism at Columbia. Her assignment was going down to a soup kitchen in the Bowery and to interview the homeless on the food lines and that's where she got the COVID. She was wearing her mask, doing what she was supposed to do but three or four days later, she started to have tightness in the chest. I tested her, we've isolated her.

The bigger question and really point that I just want to make and I'll get off is worrying about the homeless. Obviously, she got it from interviewing the homeless and who's taking care of them but that's how my daughter got it, covering the story for her school.

Brian: How do you know-- what makes you as sure as you sound that she got it on that assignment?

Fred: Well, I'm a physician, we kept it-- we were at home. I'm going back and forth to work. My wife and I had tested negative. It was that day that my wife drove her down to where she was supposed to take some photos too of the homeless and that's when-- it was on a Sunday and it was Wednesday, she started to have symptoms of shortness of breath, so she hadn't left the house.

Brian: Otherwise she wasn't going out on reporting assignments?

Fred: Nope. That was the one and I was a little disappointed with-- I won't say the name of the Ivy League school, I'll try to be respectful, but the undergrads are working from home but the grad students are still working and doing assignments, but it was on the homeless and-

Brian: Was it indoors or outdoors that contact with people?

Fred: They were eating indoors, but she was questioning and interviewing them outdoors on the line.

Brian: Fred, thank you very much for your call. Lauren in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lauren.

Lauren: Hi there, Brian. I love your show, I listened to it all the time. I thought I would call in because I am a transportation worker, a commercial airline pilot for flying out of JFK Airport.

Brian: Oh, I appreciate it.

Lauren: I contracted COVID about three weeks ago at work. I just thought I would call in because I realized the news media-- we tend to spend a lot of time considering the risks of passengers flying on potentially crowded or possibly infected aircraft but obviously, the cruise flight attendants and pilots and frontline workers in the airports are all very much susceptible to this virus as well.

One of the big challenges in my particular line of work is you can get COVID on a trip just like I did and you end up in another city, which is not where you live, it could be halfway across the country, it could be halfway across the world and then you're forced to quarantine in that location all of a sudden for two weeks minimum, if you're not symptomatic, and possibly longer if you start to show symptoms, and that's basically what happened to me.

Brian: You think you've got it flying a plane when you were only in the cockpit and not in the cabin?

Lauren: Yes, that's correct. I'm pretty certain that I was unfortunately infected by an asymptomatic co-pilot with whom I worked about a six-hour leg across the country. I believe that because that individual tested positive for COVID about four or five days before I did, and as he started to become symptomatic, he called me and let me know, as did my company after that, and then I started to feel pretty crappy pretty shortly thereafter.

Brian: Did your airline or is the industry making accommodations for people in the situation that you just described where because of the nature of your job, your landing in a city that's not your home, and then poof, you get sick and you have to quarantine, I imagine if this happened to you what's happened to others in your business?

Lauren: Yes. I think it's a work in progress, and our employers are trying to do the best that they can but there are a lot of unforeseen circumstances that can arise, especially in foreign countries. Obviously, the company will cover hotel costs for the need to quarantine or recover in another city but one of the issues that we've been seeing with our pilots at my company is a lot of the time, the number one most important thing for them is getting home, and they may have a place to quarantine safely away from their family, at home.

It's proving pretty difficult to get the company to provide safe options to get that person home, whether it's a rental car or an airline ticket because obviously, you can't put other people at risk, so I do understand their perspective, but it puts a lot of difficulty on the part of the person that's suddenly packed for two days, expecting to be home on Thursday for their kids' soccer game, and now all of a sudden, they're stuck.

In some foreign countries, they're actually locked into their hotel rooms for the duration of layovers, even if you're not symptomatic, even if you don't test positive, you're simply not permitted to leave your hotel room in many places like Hong Kong or Australia right now at all for 30 or 48 hours even without testing positive.

Brian: Let me ask you one more question as an airline pilot, the industry is trying to convince passengers that it's now safe to fly again because the ventilation systems are so good. If everybody is on a plane with a mask, it's going to be a relatively safe environment. Do you have an opinion about that?

Lauren: I do, Brian, and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about that. As the pilot in the front of the plane, we control the air conditioning and pressurization system on every flight from takeoff to touchdown. I'd like to put listeners at ease and communicate that the air in the aircraft is being fully replenished with brand new outside fresh air every two to three minutes. There's a misconception that the air inside the tube of the aircraft is stagnant and just you keep the same air for the six-hour flight or the 12-hour flight to like Asia, for example, but that's completely false.

The air is always being pumped in from outside and that's actually how we pressurize the airplane. Air is being refreshed. Airplanes are being cleaned constantly. I've actually never seen airplanes cleaner than I have in the last seven months. They're actually a very sterilized and clean environment and people should feel confident getting on the airplane as long as they keep on their masks.

Brian: Lauren, thank you so much for your call and I hope you feel better and stay safe, fly safe. Thank you very much.

Lauren: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate your time. Have a great day.

Brian: Let's go next to Ayza in Edison. Ayza, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Ayza: I'm a big fan of your show. I just wanted to talk about my experience with COVID. I haven't caught it personally but I work in a big retail store and we've had about 20 cases in the past month.

Brian: 20 cases in one big retail store. What is the store doing about it? That sounds like an outbreak that should either cause a shutdown or a major change in policy by that store.

Ayza: They just basically keep trying to cover it out and say, "We're doing our best to control the spread." I honestly don't think that's the case because they have this new screener questions and check our temperature when we walk in, but as you probably know the temperature checks are not always very accurate and you can very easily lie on the screener exams.

A lot of people are really desperate for money right now, because of holidays and rent, and the scarcity of getting jobs. A lot of people are here. They just started coming here, a lot of new hires, and a lot of these people keep cycling out because they get COVID.

Brian: Is there a union or are the workers pushing back in some organized way, so that the management does something in the store?

Ayza: Mostly, the union has been pretty quiet. I actually just started working here about two months ago. I haven't heard anything about a union yet. For the most part, a lot of the employees, they're just trying to talk to managers one-on-one and get information on who has COVID so they can know what precautions to take if they were in contact with them. You really have to go seek out the information. They're not making it easy for you to figure out who has it, who doesn't have it. It's really unfortunate.

Brian: Ayza, thank you so much for reporting in on that. Wow. Nicole in Rockland, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I have a pretty sad story about my father who's currently hospitalized for COVID. He had a UTI because he's fighting leukemia, and we took him to the hospital. He had three COVID tests upon admission and they were all negative. Over the course of the week, he just started developing symptoms, like a cough and had chills and I brought him blankets from home and I spoke to the nursing staff about it. Believe it or not, the heat was broken in his room and we thought it was that. He went home. He was discharged.

Three days later, he spiked 103 fever and we brought him back to the hospital. In the ER they swapped him, and he was positive for COVID. We are absolutely positive he contracted in the hospital. There's a few things that, in retrospect, we really think about like, first of all, the fact that there's non-systematic testing in hospital of hospital workers, it's really unfair. There were also some pretty bad practices.

There was one day when I was going to see him and the security guard was passing a pen down to each person to check in the visitors. This is before he had COVID, I had made a comment, like, "I really don't think that's a good practice. My father has a compromised immune system. I'm thinking about all the people here. You probably shouldn't be passing this pen back and forth." He didn't take [unintelligible 00:13:34] to that. He's now on week five, and he's been transferred to another hospital, and he's basically fighting for his life. It's really sad to think that these people who risk their lives every day who are working in hospitals and unknowingly transmitting COVID.

Brian: Nicole, I'm so sorry to hear the story and hear about your father. I know several people who work in hospitals and they tend to say that they're very safe environments, that the medical setting, people know how to prevent transmission of things. They're used to it. They've also gotten better at COVID, in particular, over the months, and that hospitals aren't major sources of transmission. We had a couple of calls the other day from people in other kinds of medical settings who said that they thought they got it there. You're telling me that you think your father got it in the hospital?

Nicole: Absolutely. He went nowhere else. At one point when he was admitted for his infection, we were told, "Oh, you can take your mask off when you're in the room alone when it's just three of you because you don't have-- They had such poor practices in the hospital and this a hospital, and that's what we thought too. We thought it was a safe environment. When he was discharged, he went home to my mother and she then got COVID. These are two people with compromised immune systems who haven't been in a restaurant, a grocery store.

I've been shopping for them since March. They've done everything they could. I just wanted to put it out there because, we all think it's a very safe environment, it's not. Also, I feel really bad for the people who work in hospitals who do not get systematic testing. My husband's in a profession in film and he gets tested at least once a week. He's constantly being monitored, and they have amazing practices, but in hospitals, those practices don't exist.

Brian: Nicole, thank you for your call. It's very troubling. Again, I'm sorry that your parents are going through this. We're going to take one more. Howard in Hudson County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Howard. We've got about a minute for you. Hi.

Howard: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I had, thankfully, a very mild case of COVID but it lasted well over a month from mid-October to mid-November. I've no clue where I got it. I quarantined, not obsessively. I went to the supermarket occasionally. I got my hair cut once. I went to therapy every week without my mask. I don't have any clue. It's a little frustrating to not know where you've got because there's nothing you can do about it. I think more people are clueless about how they got it than people who do know how they got it.

Brian: Where you contact traced? I'm just curious, as someone who doesn't know where you got it, there may be a lot of people in the same boat, were you contacted by a county contact tracer and go over your steps?

Howard: No, I wasn't contact traced at all. Nobody asked me. I thought about my own contacts. I couldn't really come up with where it may have happened. Now case-

Brian: What?

Howard: I'm sorry. I had a mild case with COVID but I don't have any confidence that I'm immune. I'm continuing to practice social distancing and mask-wearing.

Brian: I guess that science is still out. Howard, thank you very much. Maybe we'll follow up on this in a future segment and ask just for callers who don't know where you've got COVID and try to solve some of those mysteries. Thanks for all your calls today on that. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Maybe that was useful with some of the stories from very different kinds of venues, in terms of the prevention and protective measures that others of you can take now. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue with more in a minute.

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.