Speaker 1: It's Tuesday, July. I'm oscar A Mirrors from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America
Speaker 1: pandemic reality check. We are getting further away from the
Speaker 1: end than we should be. To be clear, it is
Speaker 1: nowhere near as bad as it was at the height
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, but once again numbers are trending in
Speaker 1: the wrong way. Infections are going up, hospitalizations and debts
Speaker 1: are going up, and in some places like l A County,
Speaker 1: mass restrictions are being reimposed. Joel Achenbach, science reporter at
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Joel,
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about a series of reality checks
Speaker 1: that I think we need for what's going on with
Speaker 1: the COVID nineteen pandemic. The sad news is that it
Speaker 1: seems that we're further away from the end then we
Speaker 1: should be. We've been seeing rising cases, rising hospitalizations, and
Speaker 1: debts unfortunately, and you know, a lot of it has
Speaker 1: to do with vaccination rates. You know, we're not completely
Speaker 1: there where we should be. But Joel tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit more about what we're seeing out there. Yes, so,
Speaker 1: just a couple of months ago, I wrote a story
Speaker 1: in the Post saying, hey, everyone, it's now okay to
Speaker 1: discuss as a concept the end of the pandemic. And
Speaker 1: that's because there were models coming out showing that the
Speaker 1: numbers might get really low in the summer in terms
Speaker 1: of the number of infections and hospitalizations and bests and
Speaker 1: all that. And the numbers did go that direction for
Speaker 1: many weeks there, and including globally that things were trending better.
Speaker 1: But the delta variant did not help at all. It
Speaker 1: is definitely more transmissible. And what happened with the vaccinations
Speaker 1: that they kind of ran out of some of the
Speaker 1: momentum as people who are reluctant to get vaccinated for
Speaker 1: whatever reason have not gotten those shots. And so what
Speaker 1: you have is you have a very still a very
Speaker 1: large cohort of people who are susceptible to the virus,
Speaker 1: and you have a more contagious virus. So the picture
Speaker 1: here at the you know, in late July, is not
Speaker 1: as good as as I thought it would be, and
Speaker 1: as some experts thought it would be just a couple
Speaker 1: of months ago. And so we've got to kind of
Speaker 1: reframe where we are in this pandemic. Yeah, definitely, I
Speaker 1: totally agree. You know, I live in Los Angeles, so
Speaker 1: Los Angeles County this past week announced that they had
Speaker 1: to reinstate indoor mass requirements for everybody. This is regardless
Speaker 1: of what your vaccination status is. And you know, these
Speaker 1: are the things that nobody wants to go back to
Speaker 1: you and nobody's arguing for much more than that right now,
Speaker 1: it seems like, but the public health officials say nothing
Speaker 1: is off the table. You know, that's always kind of
Speaker 1: the thing, and and that's kind of one of the
Speaker 1: troubling spot. There's people that have been vaccinated say well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to go back to it because people
Speaker 1: aren't getting vaccinated. But these are the worries, these are
Speaker 1: the precautions that health officials take, and that's what we
Speaker 1: don't want. But we're starting to see it again. Yeah, look,
Speaker 1: it's you know, putting the mask back on as a drag.
Speaker 1: No one wants to do it. You know. The problem
Speaker 1: is we're still in the middle of a public health emergency.
Speaker 1: I mean, the emergency definitely got dialed down once we
Speaker 1: got the vaccines out to a large part of the population.
Speaker 1: Let's not exaggerate the fact that I mean, all the
Speaker 1: things are trending in the wrong direction. It's just a
Speaker 1: lot better than it was in the winter, you know,
Speaker 1: better than it wasn't in January. There is a lot
Speaker 1: of truth to the idea that we have kind of
Speaker 1: two parallel pandemics. We have a bad pandemic for the
Speaker 1: unvaccinated and one that is less threatening to life for
Speaker 1: the rest of us. So I've been vaccinated and I'm
Speaker 1: not concerned that I'm going to get COVID and die.
Speaker 1: And I think people who who have some immunities some
Speaker 1: protection should understand that the worst case scenario is less likely.
Speaker 1: You know, there's no guaranteeing in life, and people who
Speaker 1: are vaccinated, some people still do die of COVID. They
Speaker 1: may have an under lane condition. The long term scenario,
Speaker 1: which we tried to get into in this article is
Speaker 1: that you can build up immunity in a population and
Speaker 1: a virus like stars COVIE two should over time actually
Speaker 1: become more like the flu or even a bad cold,
Speaker 1: which is what happened with the influenza virus. But we're
Speaker 1: not there yet. It's still circulating in a population that
Speaker 1: has many many people who are have no immunity. There
Speaker 1: are people who may have had some immunity from the
Speaker 1: initial wave of infections more than a year ago. How
Speaker 1: much immunity do they still have. I mean, I we
Speaker 1: don't know, but reinfection is a possibility. Other coronaviruses, after
Speaker 1: a year, you can get reinfected. There. Antibody's wane, and
Speaker 1: so I think we're going to be dealing with us
Speaker 1: for a while. And the one thing that like every
Speaker 1: single health official has said to me is, you know,
Speaker 1: we need more vaccinations out there. We need to do
Speaker 1: better at the population scale and then at the individual scale. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think some of us are going to have to
Speaker 1: rethink whether we want to eat indoors in a crowded place.
Speaker 1: You know, how do we feel about events with lots
Speaker 1: of other people there. You know, personally, I'm okay if
Speaker 1: it's outdoors. But you know, even though I'm vaccinated, with
Speaker 1: the numbers going up, I think it's time to be
Speaker 1: a little more cautious and to be prudent about it. Right,
Speaker 1: and even for those that are vaccinated, right, everybody says
Speaker 1: that's kind of the key that we're hoping to get
Speaker 1: those rates up. There have been some breakthrough infections, but
Speaker 1: thankfully for those people they're spared the most severe cases
Speaker 1: of this, and that you know, the CDC I think,
Speaker 1: is only tracking these breakthrough infections if it gets bad
Speaker 1: enough where you have to go to the hospital. So
Speaker 1: the majority of people aren't getting it that bad after
Speaker 1: they've been vaccinated. At least that's the that's the good news,
Speaker 1: that's right. And so that's another really big wild card here,
Speaker 1: which is those of us who are vaccinated, what are
Speaker 1: the odds that we will get infected anyway and infected
Speaker 1: enough that we actually are symptomatic and symptomatic enough that
Speaker 1: we need hospitalization. I think people need to know that
Speaker 1: the vaccines are great, but they don't make you totally bulletproof.
Speaker 1: I mean they vaccine has you know, some of these
Speaker 1: these variants, they can evade some of the antibodies. I
Speaker 1: think the delta that is more contagious. I mean there's
Speaker 1: the delta, there's the data, there's the gamma. The data
Speaker 1: and the gamma, I know, have some mutations to enable
Speaker 1: it to evade the antibodies a little bit. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure about the delta, but it's you know, there's this
Speaker 1: is going on. You want to be prudent, even if
Speaker 1: you've been vaccinated, I think because also you don't want
Speaker 1: to You don't want to be a vector for spreading
Speaker 1: the virus as someone else who isn't vaccinated who could
Speaker 1: have a bad outcome. Yeah. Well, you know, these are
Speaker 1: the reality checks that are happening right now. Things have
Speaker 1: gotten so much better than at the height of this
Speaker 1: whole thing, but it's not over yet, so we still
Speaker 1: need to keep pushing forward on all of this. Joel Achenbach,
Speaker 1: science reporter at the Washington Post, thank you very much
Speaker 1: for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm Astar Ramirez
Speaker 1: and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For
Speaker 1: today's big news stories, you can check me out on
Speaker 1: the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow
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