--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning. It's Wednesday, November 17th. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Samita Basu is off. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Medical professionals are leaving their jobs at a rate that could have a dramatic impact on health care in America. The Atlantic's Ed Young is telling their stories. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the pandemic. And he's been speaking with doctors and nurses about why they decided to quit medicine.
--:-- Ed Young: Healthcare workers see death and trauma and stress as a regular part of their work. They're sort of used to that. They're quitting not because they can't handle their jobs, but because they can't handle being unable to do their jobs.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Young spoke with an ICU nurse. In December, she was caring for a dying patient and wanted to give the family a little bit of extra time to say goodbye. She really pushed herself. She spent 40 minutes straight using a hand-pumped ventilation bag to give oxygen to this patient. As the family cried and prayed, her hands blistered and cramped.
--:-- Ed Young: So, you can imagine her reaction when, a few weeks later, the patient's family called to ask if the hospital staff had really done everything they could. The nurse told me, it felt like a punch in the gut.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Over the following months, things got worse for her. She was then diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and decided to leave.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: U.S. Labor Department numbers show since February of last year, the healthcare sector lost nearly a half million workers. Some of these people were forced out. Some contracted long COVID and couldn't work. Some were laid off, but many left voluntarily. One survey found since the start of the pandemic, about one in five healthcare workers quit their jobs.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: New Jersey emergency physician, Lindsay Fox is one of them. She told me how she was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of death around her.
--:-- Lindsay Fox: You know, I walked past an ice truck full of dead bodies. I saw pictures on the wall of cleaning staff nurses who had died. I walked into a room with even more dead bodies.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I think she plans to return to medicine. She is out.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Healthcare professionals told Young it wasn't just pandemic trauma that pushed them to the edge. Many had their pay and benefits cut. Some would request time off, only to be denied. Their culture is one of sacrifice. They'll put in long hours, they'll have each other's backs, they'll take extra shifts if it's necessary.
--:-- Ed Young: That's all fantastic. We depend on that. But that culture also means that they're very easily exploited by their institutions.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As Ed sees it, these healthcare departures may be foreshadowing a much bigger exodus. And that may hurt the quality of care you get. Medical and nursing school will only teach you so much. Medicine is an experiential field. You learn on the job and you learn considerably.
--:-- Ed Young: One person who knew the one thing they saw 10 years ago that saved a patient in a crunch moment, that person is now gone. Who's going to spot that early sign of an unusual problem? No one will. And worse, like no one will teach the next generation of doctors and nurses how to do that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You plan on flying somewhere for Thanksgiving? Yeah, good luck with that. NPR reports on the madness waiting for you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Long lines, packed planes, canceled flights, angry passengers, and sky-high fares. Let's start with the numbers. Bookings for next week are up about 80% from last year. They're even higher than in 2019, before the pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: People seem to feel travel is safer now, though. Over the past few weeks, U.S. COVID infections have gone up a bit. And then there is the cost of flying. Increased demand and a huge leap in fuel prices are pushing ticket prices way up, not to mention flight delays.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Southwest, American Spirit, they've all had massive meltdowns lately. There were thousands of cancellations and delays. And that was outside the holiday season. Imagine how much worse it could get next week with more travelers and nastier weather.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's a major storm system forming. It's forecast to push from the Midwest to the East Coast early next week.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now, let's say you already got your ticket. Your flight looks like it's on time. You might be thinking you're home free, right? Not so fast. You still have to get through security.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: NPR explains how there could be a possible shortage of TSA officers at checkpoints. Monday is the deadline for them to be fully vaccinated. But as of last month, around 40% hadn't reported their status.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The agency says it's been staffing up, so it hopes to minimize long lines. If screening works out and you finally get to your seat on the airplane, try to be nice.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Abuse of flight attendants is at an extremely high level. Flight attendants have been yelled at, pushed, punched. There are thousands of complaints this year about unruly passengers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The FAA says around three in four involve passengers who are refusing to mask up. So remember, if you plan to travel this year, check in online, get there early, be patient, and please be kind.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You made it to Hump Day. Just a few more days to go until the end of the week. But you have to stop to think, why? What makes today the middle of the work week? Why is the week even seven days long to begin with?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The seven-day week dominates our lives, but most people don't think about the concept much. A new book takes a hard look at it. It's called The Week, A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are, by historian David Henkin.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Jill Lepore writes about it for The New Yorker. For other calendar units, it's not hard to understand where they came from. Days, seasons, years. The sun is responsible for those measures of time. The moon dictates the length of the month, but weeks, there aren't clear answers in the sky.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There's this one theory that seven days comes from the Bible. God is said to have rested on the seventh day. But it wasn't always a given that a week would be seven days long. At times in history, there have been five, eight, and ten day weeks.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And according to this book, the seven-week became universal only about 200 years ago. And the U was apparently a big driver of that standardization. Sunday church service was an anchor, and over time, other events came to be associated with a day of the week, payday, election day.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This book argues the concept of the week was finally set in stone by television. Before streaming, people associated their favorite shows with the days they came on TV. Monday night football wouldn't exist without the seven-day week.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Today, hardly anyone stops to question why the week is seven days, but maybe we should.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Beware of armadillos. Yes, armadillos. These creatures, they usually live in Texas and in Central and South America, but now, possibly because of climate change, they're traveling north and chewing up the land as they go.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Guardian looks at this through the eyes of a rare character, an armadillo bounty hunter in North Carolina. Yes, there are people like this. And his name is Jason Bullard.
--:-- Jason Bullard: And he was used to hunting wild pigs. That is until he got his first call to go after an armadillo. He says he thought the caller had a possum and a drinking problem. But it turns out it was an armadillo.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And ever since that first call, he's been busy responding to tons of other calls like it. Hunting armadillos isn't easy. Bullard says it's like hunting aliens. They're hard to spot, hard to trap. And a standard rifle shot doesn't always kill them.
--:-- Jason Bullard: They don't see well, but their hearing is incredible. So it's fairly hard to sneak up on them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I got a kick out of all the armadillo facts in this story. Like, did you know they typically give birth to quadruplets or that they can turn themselves into rafts by inflating their intestines?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all that and more, plus which states armadillos are taking over, in the full story. If you're in the Apple News app, just tap the notification we sent you midway through the show.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.
