NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- After spending the last few weeks and episodes of the In Depth Podcast reflecting on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, this week we've decided to dive right back into the issue still dominating the public conversation: COVID-19.
More specifically, we wanted to zero in on vaccine mandates.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden put in place a mandate which required both the federal workforce and private companies with more than 100 employees to be tested on a weekly basis or to get vaccinated.
While the national mandate continues to be implemented throughout the country, we looked to a more local organization to find out what their plan is to get employees on board, and to see how effective it has been so far.
In this episode, we speak to Bob Garrett, the CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health. Aside from the fact that the company has 36,000 employees, most of those same employees are in direct contact with the virus on a daily basis. Since the state has seen a recent spike in cases, we asked about how compliance has been.
The answer may shock you; however, Garrett says, “there would be so much more ill will created by the overwhelming majority of team members who have chosen to be vaccinated, if we didn’t put this mandate in place...we have a responsibility to all of those people.”
In this episode, we also take a look at how schools are managing the ongoing crisis.
We speak to Dr. Eric Ascher, a family medicine doctor at Lenox Hill. He offers his thoughts about how schools are handling the healthcare of its cohorts. Plus he discusses his own observations in kids who contract COVID.
He says that when kids come into contact with the virus, the outcome is “uncertain.”
“We see children who do very well with COVID in the short term,” he adds. Then those same kids, “have a COVID inflammatory disease a month or two later.”
Nevertheless, he wants listeners to know, ‘It’s important to make sure that we do whatever we can to prevent children from interacting with [the virus] in the first place.”
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