Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

Will the U.S. election results change the country’s COVID-19 response?

Box of face masks, gloves, goggles.
This box of personal protective equipment resides in Tiffany Hochstetler Dillon's vehicle. The 33-year-old registered nurse works full-time for Spectra Health in Grand Forks, N.D., and also participates in a handful of outings each month with a COVID-19 rapid response team. Photographed on Friday, Aug. 14, 2020.
Ann Arbor Miller for MPR News

While the nation watched a handful of states count votes in the presidential election, 17 states saw record numbers of patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

Minnesota was one of those states: The daily case count shattered records four days in a row, reaching a record high of 5,454 on Friday, with over 900 people hospitalized for COVID-19 related issues.

Long before COVID-19 spread across the globe, science journalist Ed Yong warned that the nation wasn’t prepared to handle the next pandemic.

Since then, he’s been chronicling the national response to the pandemic and has identified several areas where the country has fallen short—from testing to distributing resources and communicating about our understanding of the disease.

Will the aftermath of the election and the recent uptick in cases be enough to chart a new course in the fight against COVID-19? Or, will the current situation remain status quo until a vaccine is widely available?

MPR News host Kerri Miller put those questions in front of science journalist Ed Yong on Monday.

Guest:

  • Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering science.

To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.


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