--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, September 17th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. 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: Hospitals in states with low vaccination rates are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. And for people who don't have COVID but are critically ill, that means they're seeing long wait times and at-capacity emergency rooms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before the pandemic, physicians would transfer patients they couldn't help to nearby hospitals. These days, they're turning to nearby states. And for some people, this is leading to traumatic or even fatal consequences. In the case of 12-year-old Seth Osborne, the delay could have cost him his life.
--:-- [Reporter Jenny Dean at ProPublica is mentioned, but not speaking directly in the original transcript. Assuming she's the one speaking next.]
--:-- Reporter Jenny Dean: Reporter Jenny Dean at ProPublica told us Seth was having terrible stomach pain, so his parents rushed him to a Florida emergency room. They had to wait more than six hours before he was diagnosed with appendicitis. Doctors eventually transferred him to a different hospital where he had emergency surgery. So it would have been roughly 24 hours from when his pain first started. The doctor operated and found out that his appendix had actually burst, which is a very serious complication and can be fatal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Deem says when hospitals are at capacity, they're stuck making tough choices. One option is making severely ill patients wait in the ER for a spot to open up. Studies show that longer waits are linked to worse outcomes for patients.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Deem told us another story out of Texas. A 46-year-old Army veteran named Daniel Wilkinson, He did two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He was awarded the Purple Heart. And he, too, had abdominal pain. And the emergency physician diagnosed Mr. Wilkinson with gallstone pancreatitis, which is pretty serious, but very treatable.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wilkinson needed surgery. His doctors scrambled for six hours to find a hospital with space to treat him. They couldn't find anything available in Texas. Hospitals in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, and Oklahoma wouldn't take him either.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Dr Keckley was so desperate after calling all these hospitals that he actually went on Facebook and he posted this very frantic all message that went out to physician groups all over the country. And it said getting rejected by all hospitals in Texas due to no ICU beds Please help. Message me if you have a bed. Patient is in ER now. I am the ER doc. Will fly anywhere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And to me, that is just chilling. I mean, that's where we're at. It shows a real breakdown in our medical system. By the time they found a bed for him, it was too late. The internal damage was too severe. Wilkinson died 26 hours after his initial ER visit.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's been a tumultuous few weeks for Time's Up, the organization that grew out of the early Me Too movement. It had a star-studded start. You remember the Golden Globes back in 2018? Hollywood actors walked the red carpet wearing all black. They brought activists as their dates. The whole point was to bring attention to workplace sexual harassment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Time's Up went on to raise millions of dollars. And it launched a legal defense fund to connect survivors to legal services. But a recent report linking Time's Up to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's sexual harassment scandal led to a major unraveling at the organization, and now its future is in question.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When Governor Cuomo was accused of sexual harassment, he and his office sought advice from Time's Up on what to do about it and how to handle it. At one point, they drafted a letter that appeared to criticize one of the women who was accusing Cuomo.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Rebecca Keegan. She writes for The Hollywood Reporter and has been closely following what's happening at Time's Up.
--:-- Rebecca Keegan: Keegan reported last week, Time's Up dissolved its advisory board, which had a lot of A-list actors on it. Its governing board resigned, too. One of our latest pieces looks at how the shakeup is affecting the Legal Defense Fund.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One thing to understand is there's Time's Up and there's the Legal Defense Fund. These are two separate entities, each with its own leadership. But the fund gets a lot of its money from Time's Up. Even as the Legal Defense Fund has struggled to distance itself from Time's Up and its mess, Keegan reports some survivors have been critical of the legal services they getting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She spoke to a woman named Lauren Weingarten who told Keegan while she was working at CBS she was sexually harassed and bullied by crew members and was sexually assaulted by an actor on set. When police refused to pursue her case, she says she reached out to the Legal Defense Fund.
--:-- Rebecca Keegan: Weingarten says she went through a series of legal referrals and most didn't fit her case. Several were located in the wrong state. One specialized in divorce. Weingarten told Keegan she was left feeling unheard and unsupported.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Weingarten was also surprised to learn on her own that CBS is one of Time's Up's strategic partners. Keegan says Weingarten thought that's a huge conflict of interest, and she felt that that information should have been disclosed to her.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The group was founded in a Hollywood agency and with big money donors. Some of whom work for corporations that themselves have been accused of sexual harassment or assault. And so really the central question of Time's Up has been, how can you advocate for victims when you were created by and funded by some people who are accused of being perpetrators?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Have you noticed that you have a shorter fuse these days? Is your threshold for things that take you off just a little bit lower than usual?
--:-- Shamita Basu: It probably has something to do with 18 months of living through a traumatic, life-threatening pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Oh, I can certainly relate. I've seen people who are normally very calm just lose it. And according to The Wall Street Journal, consumer data is showing customer satisfaction is at its lowest level since 2005.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One expert tells the journal people who are experiencing pandemic fatigue and high levels of stress are irritable and demanding.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Meanwhile, companies may have fewer resources and services than they did before the pandemic. You've been hearing about what's going on on airplanes, right? I mean, just this year, the Federal Aviation Administration launched more than 750 investigations related to unruly passengers. That's five times as many as they did in 2019.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Restaurant workers are getting it, too. A recent poll of food service workers found 80 percent had either witnessed or experienced hostile behavior related to virus safety measures.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Journal spoke with Brandi Felt. She co-owns a restaurant in Massachusetts and she said after a series of customers got a little nutty she had to shut down the restaurant for a day just to give everyone a paid break. She said insults and customer demands were affecting the way her staff feel about themselves and about coming to work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Psychologists tell The Wall Street Journal that the promise of vaccinations last spring, followed by the surge of the Delta variant, makes this phase of the pandemic particularly difficult. It's getting more challenging to muster empathy for others and to control your own knee-jerk reactions.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One psychologist says when you think something is going to be temporary, you can take higher levels of stress. But when things don't go as expected, it makes us more likely to be hard on ourselves and on others.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Planning a trip to Aspen anytime soon? Yeah, I know, Aspen, right? Well, the tourism board would like you to leave your fancy clothes at home and dress appropriately for the weather. Or if you're going to Bend, Oregon, they're asking, please walk as much as you can, don't drive. Or Finland, be sure to keep your voice down and respect the locals.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These are real requests coming from tourism boards in cities around the world. As people are getting out and starting to travel again, CNN reports, cities are seeing this as an opportunity to reset expectations around how to be a good tourist. And in some cases, they're asking visitors to take a pledge, a pledge to be more respectful to the land and the people who live there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Basically, they're saying don't be a jerk. Iceland has a six-part course on their tourism website. And it has things like how to drive in Iceland, how to safely take selfies, and actually my favorite, how to avoid hot tub awkwardness. Big hot tub culture in Iceland.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And in the end of it, they give you a tourism diploma. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And check out our weekend interview show, In Conversation. This week, I spoke with journalist Joshua Prager about his new book. It's about the woman at the center of Roe v. Wade. Years ago, Prager learned she never had the abortion she was seeking. And all of a sudden, a light bulb went off in my head, and I said to myself, wow, that means that somewhere a child was born, a child whose conception occasioned the lawsuit Roe v. Wade.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Enjoy that weekend listen. We'll be back with the news on Monday.
