--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, July 26th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: COVID cases are back on the rise in America. The Delta variant is more contagious and it's making its way through states with low vaccination rates. Public health officials and physicians in those states are trying to figure out how best to curb what they're calling a fourth wave.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's Politico's health care reporter, Erin Banco. We talked with her after she came back from a week-long reporting trip across Louisiana and Alabama.
--:-- Erin Banco: In both those states, only about 35% of people are fully vaccinated. They're seeing an old pattern return. Cases go up, Hospital beds filled to capacity. This time, though, there's a big difference. Fewer medical staff are able to help. They've experienced a lot of nurses and physicians leaving their posts in the hospital over the last year from burnout and exhaustion. So they're stretched very, very thin.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Physicians I spoke to in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are pulling, you know, 15-hour days on a regular basis. So it's really an all-hands-on-deck situation.
--:-- Erin Banco: And yet, despite the growing danger, I was told that the public health officials I talked to are still having a hard time convincing more people to get vaccinated. It's really a tapestry of different reasons why folks are not getting vaccinated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is that cohort in Louisiana, Alabama, who say, look, this was too fast. I don't trust it. There are others who say, why hasn't the vaccine been fully approved? Why is it still under emergency authorization by the FDA?
--:-- Erin Banco: But most of the people I spoke to, even if they say, look, I don't think the vaccine's safe, they also have that political undertone to their reasoning that they don't like the Democrats, that they don't like Biden, and they don't trust the White House.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Alabama Governor Kay Ivey had some sharp criticism last week. It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folk.
--:-- Erin Banco: But I was stressed to us that the doctors and public health officials I interviewed say criticism may not change many minds. Although they are frustrated that these people have chosen not to get vaccinated, they said it's not much different than the patients they treat who are smokers and choose not to quit. Or people who have diabetes who lived an unhealthy lifestyle before that and continue to live unhealthy lifestyles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And everyone's trying to find a way to speak to the unvaccinated community without being condescending, with trying to speak to them on a human-to-human level. But that takes work.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But they are hopeful. They are hopeful that people will begin to get the shot the more and more people get infected with the Delta variant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you type in the word flooding on social media platforms, you're going to see a lot of videos popping up from all around the world and from major cities in particular. Recently, several people in Zhengzhou drowned in a flooded subway station.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Chinese authorities say more than a million people there were displaced by last week's floods. India and Germany also experienced catastrophic deadly flooding this month.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's a common thread in many of these events. As Slate reports, 20th century design is no match for powerful 21st century storms.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And that means extreme weather events and also smaller floods can cause major damage or turn deadly. Slate explains how cities have been struggling against water for decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In a word, the problem is pavement. Development disrupts the natural flow of water unless it's done carefully. And if enough water hits roads and parking lots, there's nowhere for it to drain.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Slate points to Houston as a place that's made changes. Hurricane Harvey caused punishing floods. Voters there backed a plan for new flood infrastructure. Developers now have to make sure any sites they design are able to deal with all the rain.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's one reason parking lots in Houston now have these grassy flood pits. Cities like Chicago and St. Louis have tried building deep tunnels to bottle rainstorms.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But ultimately Slate says building flood infrastructure like tunnels can be an expensive solution to a hard problem. Going up against Mother Nature is a tough fight especially with climate change making weather more and more extreme.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Rising inflation and pandemic-induced money troubles are hurting families. So many people are struggling to pay for basic goods. And things are especially hard for parents of very young kids, diaper prices are shooting up.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Wall Street Journal reporter Sharon Turlip told us what's going on here.
--:-- Sharon Turlip: Diaper prices have risen more than 10 percent before the pandemic, and that's because everything involved in making diapers has become more expensive, from the materials used to make the diapers, the adhesive, the stuffing that makes diapers absorb liquid, to the cost of transporting diapers, to labor costs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All of this has become more expensive for manufacturers. As more parents struggle, diaper banks are stretching to fill the gap. Last year, they gave away nearly 150 million diapers. That's close to 75 percent more than the year before.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Families have gotten frustrated enough that politicians are now taking notice. In the past, Congress and state lawmakers, they've been reluctant to spend public money on basic baby supplies. But that's beginning to change.
--:-- Sharon Turlip: State governments are increasingly becoming open to either tax breaks on diapers or funding for diapers and the agencies that distribute them for free.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Louisiana recently became the first southern state to declare diapers exempt from state sales taxes. About a dozen other states do so. And there are also several states that in the last year, in the last six months, have allocated state funds to go toward agencies, diaper banks or other nonprofits to provide diapers to low-income people for free.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are about to get into some Olympics news, so consider this your spoiler alert. If you're planning to watch later on and you don't want to hear the results right now, feel free to skip ahead in the show 45 seconds. Okay? All good? Last call? All right, here we go with some Olympics results.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Team USA keeps racking up medals in the pool. The men's team took the gold in the 4x100m freestyle relay.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Katie Ledecky was upset in the 400m freestyle. She took silver and Australia's Arne Titmuss got the gold.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And the host nation is establishing early dominance in the new Olympic sport of skateboarding. Momiji Nishia took the first ever gold medal in women's street skateboarding. She's just 13 years old.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Japan's Yuto Horigome previously won the men's event.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Okay, that's it for results. Now we turn to an Olympic profile that caught our eye from the LA Times. It's about a coach who made a promise to an athlete back at the Rio Games in 2016.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you qualify for the Tokyo Games, I will be there.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It may not sound that remarkable, but Yosh Ochida was 96 years old when he made that promise. And he fully intended to keep it.
--:-- Sharon Turlip: He made plans to be in the stands in Tokyo, but you know what happened with pandemic restrictions on spectators.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Now at 101 years old, Uchida will watch his pupil, American judo competitor Colton Brown, from his home in California.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The LA Times tells the story of how this son of Japanese immigrants has trained generations of American athletes. Seeing a pupil compete in Tokyo brings his career full circle. He was the U.S. judo coach in the 1964 Tokyo Games.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It was a big year for judo. The sport was making its Olympic debut in the country of its birth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Uchida is something of a godfather of judo in the U.S. He's been fighting for the sport and coaching athletes for decades. He is still the head of the judo program at San Jose State, which has produced several Olympians over the years.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He started there in 1946. And he's not done yet. He's been working on an exchange program with Japanese universities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's not sure how long it'll take, but hopes that it'll be ready before he turns 110.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: His colleagues say they won't be surprised if he gets it done.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're partnering with NBC Olympics throughout the Games. You can find stories, results and videos, along with lots of other great journalism, all on the Apple News app.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
