captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, ju 25: the latest on the coronavirus outbreak, and how racial health inequities contribute to the spread. a week of memorials begins for representative john lewis. >> he's on fire! en>> sasan: and, the debate over the "hot hand" phenomenon. next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. th abernard and denise schwartz.yl the chnd philip milstein ucamily. barbara hoperberg. charles ronblum. we try to live in the moment,s to notat's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomrow

can help you make e most of today. mutual of america financial group, retirement services and investments. additional support has been provided by: consumer cellular. and by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. and by contributions to your ikpbs station from viewers you. thank you. >> sreenivasan: good evening, and thank you for joining us. s the unittes remains the center of the coronavirus pandemic, with new confirmed infections near record highs. there were more than 72,000 confirmed new infections yesterday, according to the centers for disease control and ilevention. on average, the number of positive tests has doubled over the last month. there were more than 1,100 deaths reported in the u.s. on friday for the fourth consecutive day. in total, more than 145,000

people have died since late february, according to researat johns hopkins. in hot spotsike florida, texas, and a, new confirmed cases are not spiking like they were in recent weeks, but nationwide cas are still rising in more than three dozen states, according to data compiled by ew york times," and nationwide, hospitalizations for the virus ar the record highs set back in mid-april. worldwide, are now more than 15.7 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, and more than 640,000 deaths. in brazil, president jair bolsonaro tweeted todathat coronavirus.ative for the bolsanaro tested positive on july 7, after downplaying the severity of the pand brazil's outbreak is the worst in the world outside of the s with more than two million confirmed cases and 8500 deaths. in spain, health officials have struggled with regional spikes lockdown one month o.de in the northeastern state of catonia, there have been nearly 8,000 new confirmed cases

in the last two weeks. the french government is recommending that citizens not cross the border into spain. and, the norweigan government mandated a ten-day quarantine for travelers returning from spain. tland, oregon last night thousands of people demonstrated in the streets outside the federal courthouse. presters marched, shook a protective fence and threw bottles and fireworks. federal agents, sent to the cy despite opposition from local officials, used tear gas at raclnge and flash bangs to rodisperse the cwds. late yesterday, a federal dge denied a request from oregon's attorney general to restrict the actions of federal police sent to the city by the trump administration. the state sought a restraining orde ruled oregon did not have standing in the case to sue on behalf of protesters. demonstrations portland began after the murder of george floyd in may, and have continued nightly. saate and local officials l officers are making the situation worse. e acting secretary of homeland

security says the officers are protecting federal property. the president has called t demonstrators "anarchists and agitators," and is threatening to send federal agents to other cities. for the third straight week, thousands of protesters rallied in russia's far eastern region of khabarovsk today. the unusual public prosts are in support of the region's former governor who was arrested and sent to moscow earlier this nth, on charges he murdered two businesen 15 years ago. the governor, serg furgal, defeated a candidate backed by president vladimr putin's party in 2018. furgal's supporters say the kremlin is intruding in local afirfain an attempt to grab power in the region, which is seven time-zones east of moscow. popular regional governo entered a plea of not guilty and remains in custody. hanna is of the 2020 atlantic season, as it moves toward the texas gulf coast. thu.s. national hurricane center predints hanna will ue to strengthen, and make landfall in texas near corpus christi this evening e and tornado warnings

are also in effect. the area is one of several covid-19 hot spots in the state. in the caribbean, tropical storm go ma bring heavy rain to the southern wiward islands. and, hawaii is preicring for hurrane douglas, a powers l storm thatedicted to pass very close to the islands or for more on today's national and international news, visit www.pbs.org/newshour. sreenivasan: a week of memorials honoring the late civil rights leader and member of congresjohn lewis began in his hometown of troy, alabama today. ♪ ♪ the casket bearing lewis' body was brought to troy university this morning. the service honored "the boy from troy"-- aame the reverend martin luther king, jr. gave to lewis died on july 17 at age 80 from pancreatic cancer. i spoke with alabama public radio news director pat duggins earlier today about the memorial service in troy, and tomorrow's planned procession from selma to

montgomery. first, this is the beginning of a long series days where we're going to be honoring john lewis. whwas special about alabama? whyrt sere? >> well, because he grew up just toutside city of troy. i mean, he was the son of sharecroppers, and he saexperienced kind of racial discrimination that everyone did. he couldn't check books out of there were the other, colored water fountains and the white water fountains-- and one thing that was pointed out to me over the years is, those colored water untains had warm water, and then the white ones d cold water. so, i mean, if you're in alabama in one of those 100-degree days, i mean, it's pret awful. so, alabama turned out to be kunind of aattleg not only for him, but also for dr. king. b f his family who attended en masse for this event today, it was kind of a-- it was a homecoming for them. and some of the stories they told were-- were really heartwarming, really kind of give you a side of john lewis you didn't know about.

>> sreenivasan: what struck you? what's an example of something thate are unlikely to hear, when it comes to the, sort of, pressional eulogies that might happen later in the week? >> well, his sister confided that he was afraid of thunder and lightning. and, no one ever called m hn. i mean, if you wanted to know somebody who really knew john lewis well, they always called him robert. because that's his middle name. and then, one time-- his brother henry was eulogizing him and said, you know, "the first time that john was being sworn into me a big thumbs up, and thenw afterwards, i walked up to him and said why'd y give me a thumbs up from?" and john said, "man, we've come a long way from alabama, haven't we?" >> sreenivasan: so, what all is planned in alabama now, afteer thisce that we saw today? >> well, there's going to be a service toat brown a.m.e. church in selma, which is one of the marshalling areas for the-- the voting rights marches that hn lewis took part in, in 1965, when he and the others were attacked on the edmund tpettus bridge. n tomorrow, there's going to be a procession over the bridge,

which is where lewis and all of his-- his friends wanted to go, you know, during the fight for voting rights. and then tomorrow, also, there's going to be a moment where he's tlaid in state alabama capital. then on monday, he'll be-- people will be abl respects at the u.s. capital. and then on wednesday, he comes back to atlanta and he'llay in state there and then he'll be interred during a family-only affair just outside of atlanta. >sreenivasan: what's been the reaction like from his birthplace this past week? >> well, if you ask his family, it was kind of a homecoming. i mean, there was singing during the memorial ceremony today. there was dancing. i may be being a bit of a curmudgeon, but it struck me that the-- the event started at 10:00 a.m. central time, sharp, itanook 17 minutes before the first african american person got to talk. s'vo, ygot that going on. you've got the head of troy university saying, oh, well, back in the day, we wouldn't even allow him to enter the

university, and, later on, we hga an honorary doctorate, how about that? the state troopers that were part of the attacking squad in 1965, during bloody sunday, were the ones now looking or his casket, which is obviously draped with the american flag. so, one small sign of how things have changed. but then-- i read an associated ilpress account i was getting ready for this interview-- about how the police chief at troy universy was suspended because he went on social media and said that george floyd contributed to his own death. so, things e changing. things are not changing. it's kind of glacia and unfortunately, john lewis didn't see it to its fruition. he got a lot done, but stl clearly a lot left to do. >> sreenivasan: pat duggins, alabama public radio, thanks so much. >> thank you, hari. >> sreenivasan: as protests for black lives matter continue across the country, many state and local leaders have declared

racism a public health crisis. this comes as coronarus cases are disproportionately impacting communits of color. e of the many institutions facing a reckoning, of sorts, is the healf.th care system its i spoke recently with dr. rhea boyd, a california-based pedindatricianublic health advocate, who says structural racism in the healthcare system only compounding the public health crisis. this pandemic, and also our reckoning with race, has brought a couple of different big ideas together, which is that there are unequal health outcomes for americans based on the color of their skin. how does the health care system play in to these inequities? >> you know, that's a real critica one that we often ask. but our health care system and cehow it distributes resoto populations based on their racial and ethnic intities absolutely shapes the racial

health inequities we see hterging generally, and r now in the pandemic. one example of that is the insurance marketplace. our health care system offers you health care based on your nsurance access. but we know that that access tiers the quality of care that patients receive, and there's been data to suggest that it that patients reces the care those are examples of how business models and health care drive broader inequities. and there are reasons why we nereed unl health care in the united states. >> sreenivasan: u know, we have heard about, for example, maternal mortality statistics for black women and how they're worse. i mean, what are the systemic failures that get black women to a position where that outcome... well, guess, really isn't paid attention to enough. but, when you think about it throughout the lifecycle of a person of color in amica, what are those gaps that we take for granted? >> so, racial health inequities like the maternal mortality gap,

likore the infantlity gap, they reveal legacies and current praluctices of racial eon and discrimination in our country. reflect who has access safe environments, clean water, who has access to health care, like we've already mentioned. who has cess to employment in industries that might offer at, duringotections this pandemic, might keep people more safe. things like paid sick leave or pare access to p.p.e. just all of those critical supports are rracially distributed in society, and there are reasons hy we see broad inequities generally, and specific pandemic.right now during the >> sreenivasan: during the pandemic, we'vedlso seen is a isproportionate amount of it mp health care workers of color. what can we do to try to restructure a workforce that-- well, kind of relies on the

labor of all americans-- but it seems that some of the tasks that are at higher risk, we're putting these people at higher risk, are falling disproportionately on people of color. >> this is one of the devastatinthings about how racism works in society. even being a member of a protected workforce like health careuring a pandemic, still isn't enough to ep black folks, filipino workers, like geu mentioned, latinx folks and inus populations safe, because when they leave their lybs, they still go back to structurnequal living conditions. and that's what really puts people at risk >> sreenivasan: how do you i mean, as you mentioned, there are pretty powerful forces. how do you make sure that there are these outcomes in n e long at people can get together around? >> in health care, one way to do that is with government regulation. i think government regulation is one of the hallmarks of anti-discrimination advances

throughout society, that you need the government to say that inrtain things are allowed and certain aren't allowed, that certain things are rights and other things are privileges. and i think, in this country, we need to say really firmly-- and we need our government to say it for all of us-- that health care is a right, that everyone should have access to it, and that our government will invest in ensuring that that's possibility. that then would create incentives, financial and moral, within health care to ensure that everybody has access to that right. >> sreenivasan: as workplaces go through their own reckonings on race, what should the heal care industry-- which are doctors and hospitals-- know and study abcism before they practice their craft? >> so, racism hurts people. premature mortality for allto racial and ethnic groups in this country. d and that means doctors n better understand the mechanisms by which racism harms health. medicine, we need to make understanding the impacts of racism on he professional competency. every clinician should know it. >> sreenivasan: finally, i want

tosk, are you concerned about the vaccines that may arise for covid-19 and how that plays out? i mean, whether there's equal access to the vaccine, whether there is equal adoption, depending on where you live and the color of your skin. >> absolutely. distributed equitably in our society, and racial and ethnic minoritized groups tend to be excluded. ando, i do have concerns th if a vaccine is created and it isn't made freely available to everyone, that costs will be a huge barrier to folks getting it. >> sreenivasan: heading into this fall, we know tha influenza comes back, and we know that not everybody gets a flu vaccine when they have a chance to. if people choose not to take the influenza vaccine, choose not to take the covid-19 vaccine, what kinds situations are we setting ourselves up for? >> i think we have to prepare

for a reity where at least half of adults may not get the covid vaccine, similar to the me half of adults whdon't get the influenzvaccine. we need to prepare for it.an what i mean by that is, we need to institute universal protections for everybody. the government has to enable all americans to wear masks. ab has to make testing ava to all americans routinely-- not just routinely-- so that as folks' exposures change, move throughout the world, so that they don't risk infecting others. lswehave to provide income supports. we need another federal relief package so tt folks can safely stay home from work if they're sick, and so that folks can still pay their rent and stay in separate living cilities so that they don't, again, expose others, potentially. >> sreenivasan: all right. dr. rhea boyd, pediatrician h d publ heavocate. thanks so much for joining us. >> thank you so much for having me.

>> sreenivasan: sports in the united states are finally back-- baseball kicked off an abbreviated 60-game season this week, and basketball starts today with the w.n.b.a., followed by the n.b.a. later this week. players, staff and media are quarantined, everyone is tested focovid-19 regularly, and the games are being played with no fs in attendance. but the extraordinary circumstances of this season won't change a familiar phenomenon-- players will go on streaks where th just can't em to miss. athletes will tell you, the so-calle hand" is undeniable, but, how do you know does it even exist?ally, in a new book, "wall street journal" reporter ben cohen chronicl research behind these streaks and, in this interview taped right before the n.b.a. season own in march, we started by talking out a virtual court. ♪ ♪

in the 1993 video game "n.b.a. jam," teams of two play a souped-up, exaggerated version of basketball. but there was ature of the game that basketball fans everywhere recognized: after a player made three shots in a row, he could not miss. >> he's on fire! >> we wanted to get to that point where we heard those three magical words. this game was seductive to kids erof a certain gion, and part of it was because of the hot hand. of ben cohen's recent ok,e name which delves into a question that has vexed economists and pchologists for decades: whether the "hot hand" exists. > he's heating up! >> sreenivasan: while cohen says that "n.b.a. jam" codified tor "hot hand" f generation of video game players, for many sports fans, its existence is as simple as watching the golden state warriors' stephen curry. cohen covers the n.b.a. for the "wall street journal," and he writes about a night in februae of 2013 whercurry seemingly could not miss. >> look out, that guy isot! >> curry for three-- wow!

>> sreenivasan: curry made 11 of his 13 three-pointers, finishing the t night with 54 points,he most he has ever scored in one game. curry's legendary hot hand that night helped propel him to super-stardom. >> in many ways, that game wasin an inflection in his career. what he likes to say is that wh doesn't kno he's going to be hot. he doesn't know where he's going to be hot. he doesn't know why he might hot. but once he does get hot, he has to embrace it. and that's what t did that niainst the knicks. >> sreenivasan: but was curry's performance the result of a hot hand, where basket made hitting the next one more likely? or are we seeing patternwhere there might just be a statistical anomaly? >> tgehere is a realrational debate about whether there is such a thing as the hot hand. and all of that started with the publication of aaper in 1985 with this counterintuitive conclusion, which is that there nd no such thing as a hot it's simply a misreading of randomness.> > sreenivasan: psychologists thomas gilovich, robert vallone, and amos tverskyad cornell

university undergraduates shoot baskets from where they ftatistically made about half their shots. the philadelphia 76ers duringy the 1980-81 season. it was the only team in the n.b.a. that kept track of consecutive shots during games. >> gonot too longeven just the basic chronology of basketball shots was this motherlode of data. and what happened once they analyzed that data was that they shothwe you were actually no more likely to make your next shots in a row. or three >> sreenivasan: cohen says the findmiing by three acs did not necessarily change the minds of the basketball world. >> one lucky reporter actually got to tellhe great boston ltics coach, red auerbach, about this paper. and red auerbach sort ofneered and sa like, "what is this? i don't care about these professors. like, they make a study. i couldn."'t care le and that was generally the view among basketball players because we'd all feltghhe hot hand, we'd seen the hot hand. and here were these professcoors ming along and telling us there was no such thing.

>> sreenivasan: cohen details how this is not just a phenomenon among athletes.rs from inveso gamblers to en artists, success often appears to come in bunches. but thinking you see a streak when you might just be seeing a pattern in randomness can also have negative consequences. >> that is onof the central points of the original paper: not only is there no such thingu believing in the hot hand is a costly illusion. >> sreenivasan: cohen writes about a 2016 study that looked at hundreds of thousands of asylum decisions by immigration js.ud >> what they found is that when asylum judges grant asylum to two or three refugees in a row, they're much less likely to grant asylum to a fourth applicant. >> sreenivasan: regardless of what the case is? >> regardless of the merits of the case. the "where" and the "what" and the "why" was actually ss important than the "when" ica this . now, that's crushing. it's not steph curry missing a e ot. it's someybe having to go back to their home country, where they fear persecution. isand the reason appens is because these judges are trying

to evtien out the probabi in their own minds, right. asylum three time row.e given i shouldn't give to a fourth. i should try to regress to the mean." >> sreenivan: in other words, judges do not want to look like they are on a streak. it's oa similar perception the one that makes us believe that a player who has made several make the next.w will but, an n.b.a. playsk shooting a ball is not the same thing as deciding an immigration case, and an advanced stats revolution in the n.b.a. has upended research on the existen h of the "hotnd." >> what we have now is data that wasn't available to those researchers in their nerdiest, wonkiest dreams. like, the world has changed. and sometimes, when the world changes, you have to qstion long-held assumptions. >> sreenivasan: since 2013, every arena in the n.b.a. has had cameras that track all of the action othe court. thdata allows for the quantification for exactly how hard each shot is; tracking precisely ere a player is; and

whether someone is trying to stop him. >> these researyers found that ou were actually slightly likely to make your next shot. the ball is not turning into a fireball, but this was some of the first evidence to come along to suggest that maybe our intuition was right all along. and in certain circumstances, there is such a thing as the hot hand. sreenivasan: this tracking data is not the only update to research omothe hot hand. e recent evidence of its existence has come from a two economists using coin flips. >> what they found was that if you flip coins in a sequence and you take the probability of getting a heads or tailsadfter another or a tails, it's actual not 50%, as we have been conditioned believe forever. it's actually closer to 42% or 43%. it's md-boggling. it's kind of trippy math. even people who have lapked at this and studied it and peer-reviewed it and published it have trouble wrapping their minds around it. but if you think about that in terms of the hot hand, it means that when youe shooting 50%,

you're actually exceeding probability. right? you are, as they might say, on fire. and everybody had missed this for 35 years becauset's very counter-intuitive, mathematically. that made national news when it was published as a working paper in 2015, and it has caused the living authors of the 1985 paper-- which said there was no such thing as a hot hand-- to reexamine their original findings. >> they're still experimenting with the hot hand. i was up at cornell to see a shooting experiment in a basketball gym, not unlike the one that happened 35 years ago. so, where this data leads us, i don't think y of us quite know yetbut they are some of the people who are most anxious to find out. >> sreenivasan: finally tonight, philbin has died.n host regis philbin is best known as co-host of daytime talk shows with

kathie lee gifford and kellys, ripa for 23 yend as the first u.s. host of the game show "who wants to be a millionaire." in a statent, his family said philbin died friday night of he was 88 years old. that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. for the latest news updates, visit www.pbs.org/newshour. i'm hari sasan. thanks for watching. stay healt, and have a od night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible b sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the anderson family fund. bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. baara hope zuckerberg. charles rosenblum. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front ofs. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomorrow

can lp you make the most of today. mutual of america financial group, retirement services and 5 nvestments. >> forars, consumer cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service that helps people communicatend connect. we offer a variety of no-contract plans, and our ths.-based customer service team can help find on fits you. to learn more, visit www.consumercellular.tv. adtional support has been provbyed by: an and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the erican people. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like thank you. you're watching pbs.

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