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Drilling Deep: What do truckers on the road do if they’re feeling sick in the age of the coronavirus?

· Thursday, April 09, 2020

What do truckers on the road do if they’re feeling sick, particularly in the age of the coronavirus? They often just suck it up.

But they also can head to an urgent care center at a truck stop, like the UrgentCare Travel centers found at Pilot and Flying J truckstops.

On this week’s Drilling Deep podcast, we talk to Mitch Strobin of UrgentCare Travel on what his urgent care centers at those truck stops are doing to cope with the demand for their services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The centers are the first line of medical treatment for a lot of the drivers keeping the country supplied with goods right now.

Also on Drilling Deep, host John Kingston looks at some recent numbers coming out of the diesel market. They point to lower prices, but more worrisome, they also point to lower demand, a sign of the weakening for trucking services.

John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.