'Critical staffing shortages' at hospitals, Jim Jordan shuns Jan. 6 probe: 5 Things podcast
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Quarter of hospitals report 'critical staffing shortages'
Hospitals are again being slammed by COVID-19. Plus, health reporter Ken Alltucker talks us through choosing at-home COVID tests, little progress is made after U.S./Russia talks on Ukraine, Rep. Jim Jordan will not testify before the Jan. 6 committee and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell talks inflation.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is 5 Things you need to know Tuesday, the 11th of January 2022. Today, staffing shortages at a quarter of US hospitals, plus comparing at home COVID tests and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
- President Joe Biden will address voting rights during a speech in Atlanta today. The remarks come as new voting rights legislation has stalled in the Senate.
- China has locked down a third city, Anyang, because of a COVID 19 outbreak. Some 20 million people in the country are now on lockdown because of rising cases. That does not currently include Beijing, where the winter Olympics are supposed to begin on February 4th.
- And the Georgia Bulldogs are college football national champions. The Dogs took down Alabama last night 33 to 18 for their first championship in 41 years.
Taylor Wilson:
Nearly a quarter of US hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages. That's the most since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time medical centers nationwide could set a new single day record as soon as today for inpatient care of coronavirus patients. According to the Washington Post hospitalizations yesterday totaled just over 141,000. That was barely below a record set on January 14th, 2021. Hospitals are being slammed as more than a third of US counties have reported their highest weekly case counts of the entire pandemic this past week. Local communities are also again grappling with what to do with remote vs. in person school. Chicago has been at the center of that conversation in the new year after its teachers voted to return to remote learning. But city leaders have now reached an agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union and teachers and students are returning to the classroom this week. Mayor Lori Lightfoot was optimistic about the return, while CTUVP Stacy Davis Gates said that more consistent COVID testing is needed.
Lori Lightfoot:
Teachers will be back in classes tomorrow, and all students should return on Wednesday. We know that this has been very difficult for students and families. Our goal throughout this entire process was to both get our students back to in-person learning as quickly as possible and prevent work disruptions for the rest of the school year. Switching completely back to remote learning again without a public health reason to do so would've created and amplified the social, emotional, and economic turmoil that far too many of our families are facing.
Stacy Davis Gates:
This agreement is the only modicum of safety that is available for anyone that steps foot in a Chicago public school, especially in the places in this city where testing is low and where vaccination rates are low.
Taylor Wilson:
Students in Los Angeles are returning to in-person instruction today, but only if they show a negative COVID 19 test, regardless of vaccination status. Later today, Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Wilensky will testify in front of a US Senate committee about the federal response to recent COVID variants. More than 839,000 people have died from COVID 19 in the US, part of nearly 5.5 million around the world.
COVID 19 testing. For many Americans just finding any kind of at home test has been something between a chore or nearly impossible in recent weeks. But if your pharmacy does happen to have some in stock, how do you even know which ones to buy? An independent safety group has unveiled the first public ranking of the most widely used quick and cheap at home tests. As Health Reporter Ken Alltucker tells us, the rankings are based on how easy they should be to use.
Ken Alltucker:
At home COVID tests are really a new thing for people. You're asking people to get the tests and use them and interpret the results. So I think it's a lot of unfamiliarity with the testing process. And ECRI, a nonprofit that focuses on patient safety and other health care quality and cost effectiveness issues, decided to independently evaluate seven common over the counter tests that people could buy at Amazon or other retailers. And they weren't looking for how well the tests worked in terms of finding the COVID 19 virus. They were looking at how easily these tests are for people to use who may be unfamiliar with these tests. So they felt that there was a gap in the public's knowledge on this. The Food and Drug Administration, of course, monitors for these tests, for how well they work, safety and effectiveness, and requires the companies to submit studies prior to allowing these tests on the market. So they felt that that angle was covered. But for people actually using these tests, many for the first time, that's the question they tried to address.
And what they found was some of the tests had easier instructions than others. One in fact, which they assigned the lowest score to, which is called the BD Veritor, didn't have any printed instructions according to ECRI, and just had a video survey that people could take, and a step by step instruction through video. The top test, according to ECRI, in terms of how easy it was to use was something called the On/Go. They assigned it the highest score of the seven tests that they look at.
Taylor Wilson:
Check out Ken's full story in today's episode description.
Very little progress was made yesterday in Geneva, as officials from the US and Russia met to discuss Ukraine and other issues. Neither side outlined the meeting as a complete failure, but they also did not offer any clear plan to ease the standoff over Russia's military buildup on its border with Ukraine. Moscow continues to push for NATO to stop expanding East and to not welcome Ukraine as a member. Washington has shrugged off those demands as a non-starter. State Department spokesperson Ned Price.
Ned Price:
These were discussions, they were preliminary discussions. And the idea was for the United States, and in our hope the Russian Federation, to come with viable, practical, reciprocal ideas, to put those on the table, and to see if there were the potential for progress. We did not intend this to be a forum where certainly decisions were reached or any breakthroughs could be achieved, or really even contemplated. We do expect to be in touch with the Russian Federation again in the coming days to determine when and how this conversation will go forward. That conversation at the end of this week or in the coming days, will also be informed by what we and our allies and partners hear in the two fora that are coming up up this week, the NATO Russia council, and in the OSCE.
We are not talking about concessions whatsoever. We are talking about seeking elements, seeking ideas, seeking proposals that are in our... collectively that are in our security interest. So again, these are not things that we would do unilaterally. These are not things that we would do in an effort just to get Moscow to back down, just to get Moscow to return its troops to their permanent bases. These are things that ultimately would redound in favor of our collective security.
Taylor Wilson:
Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said that no progress was made on the central demand of NATO expansion. Though he did crucially say that Russia has no intention to invade Ukraine.
Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan says he will not testify in front of the committee investigating last year's January 6th insurrection. That's despite a request from the select committee that he do so. That committee was created to investigate the circumstances that caused supporters of former president Donald Trump to storm the US Capitol while lawmakers certified election results last year. Jordan is a close ally of Trump and himself voted against certifying election results. White House reporter Matthew Brown has more.
Matthew Brown:
Jim Jordan has said that he is not going to testify before the January 6th Select Committee, because he, "believes that he does not have any relevant information that the committee could use in its investigation to discover the origins of January 6th." He has said also that the Committee he believes is engaged in partisan activities that are attempting to make Republicans look bad or appear entirely responsible for the January 6th insurrection on the Capitol. Obviously the Capitol attack was orchestrated by a pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol building on the day that lawmakers were trying to certify the election of president Joe Biden.
Jordan called the exercise in trying to uncover the origins of that attack a partisan cudgel that Democrats were using. Naturally the Committee, which is entirely consistent of Democrats and two Republicans - representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger - has pushed back on this characterization multiple times, both when close Trump associates like former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House senior advisor Steve Bannon refused to testify as well. Though in this situation you're seeing Chairman Benny Thompson of the committee has conceded that when a member of the same body that they are sitting in is declining to testify, it's much more difficult for the Committee to hold them in contempt.
So the Committee has a number of further abilities that they can put forth. They have not said anything at the moment on what their next steps are going to be with Jordan, but they do have the power, for instance, to continue to subpoena other members around him, continue to formally request that he does testify before them, but they do have deeper limits in terms of what they can actually demand Jordan himself to do in this situation, given that he is one of their colleagues.
Taylor Wilson:
The Senate Banking Committee today will hold a hearing on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's nomination to a second four year term. And his remarks are expected to center on inflation. Powell will say that high inflation is taking a toll on American families, especially when it comes to the high costs of essentials. Inflation has risen to its highest level in four decades, and later this week the government is expected to report that consumer prices jumped 7.1% over the past 12 months. That's up from November's 6.8% annual increase. Powell's nomination is expected to be approved by the Senate with bipartisan support.
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us right here every morning, all year long, wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks as always to PJ Elliot for his great work on the show, and I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from Paste BN.