Speaker 1: It's Thursday, February ten. I'm Oscar Ramires from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Speaker 1: A new attitude is beginning to take shape with a pandemic.
Speaker 1: People are over it and ready to move on. Of
Speaker 1: the US is fully vaccinated and many have natural immunity
Speaker 1: from prior infection. Democratic governors are beginning to relax pandemic
Speaker 1: rules and cases are dropping at a rapid rate. Lenny Bernstein,
Speaker 1: health and medicine reporter at the Washington Post joins us
Speaker 1: for the shifting attitude towards the pandemic. Thanks for joining us, Lenny.
Speaker 1: I wanted to bring you on to talk about the
Speaker 1: shifting attitudes again going on right now with the pandemic.
Speaker 1: You know, we've been here before where this moment where
Speaker 1: we feel the surge has been dying down, people are
Speaker 1: ready to get back to normal, you know, and then
Speaker 1: another surge comes up or something like that. So we've
Speaker 1: kind of been on this roller coaster, but right now
Speaker 1: it seems to be taking hold a little bit stronger now.
Speaker 1: People are ready to move on. You made mention of
Speaker 1: other other news outlets writing up store easy. You know,
Speaker 1: vaxxed and done. People just being you know, we've taken
Speaker 1: all the precautions we can. We're ready to move on
Speaker 1: with all of this stuff. But Lenny, walk us through
Speaker 1: some of this. What are we seeing out there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you've touched on some of the high points there.
Speaker 1: A number of things are just coming together at the
Speaker 1: same time. Number one, we're vaccinated. Sixty of us are
Speaker 1: fully vaccinated, and then a chunk of those folks have boosters,
Speaker 1: so they're feeling pretty good about their protection. It held
Speaker 1: against O macron, certainly against severe disease and hospitalization. Yes,
Speaker 1: they may have gotten infected, but it was generally mild.
Speaker 1: If you have the vaccine and the booster and even
Speaker 1: and even those that have had natural infection already too,
Speaker 1: I mean that offers them at least some type of protection. Exactly.
Speaker 1: Another chunk of people have had the disease and so
Speaker 1: they have natural immunity, and you can, to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: according to the research, add them to the group that's protected.
Speaker 1: The next thing is that O macron is not fading.
Speaker 1: It's dropping like a rock thirty and down week over week.
Speaker 1: That's a lot, and people are starting to feel better
Speaker 1: about the direction that's going in. You know, it's still
Speaker 1: at very high levels tod cases a day, but it's
Speaker 1: dropping really fast. And then I think the third thing
Speaker 1: is the number of months we've been dealing with this.
Speaker 1: We're now fully into the month of this pandemic, and
Speaker 1: people are exhausted. They are more willing to take their
Speaker 1: chances now than they were I think doing any of
Speaker 1: the previous five searches. Yeah, and you know, we're seeing
Speaker 1: it reflect already in public policy. So California just recently
Speaker 1: announced that they're gonna end their indoor mask mandate for
Speaker 1: those that are vaccinated. We're seeing a handful of Democratic
Speaker 1: states that are taking back mask mandates for schools. That
Speaker 1: shifted attitude is taking hold at the public policy level
Speaker 1: as well. You did make mention the article though we
Speaker 1: have been through this before, We've unfortunately been wrong a
Speaker 1: lot of times with these up and downs, this roller coasters.
Speaker 1: These new variants have been pop being up, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that a lot of health experts
Speaker 1: still say, we don't know when that next variant could
Speaker 1: come up. Yeah, the health experts would rather that we
Speaker 1: not move quite as quickly as we are with the
Speaker 1: shedding the mask mandates that you mentioned. They would like
Speaker 1: us to be a little more cautious, but politicians reflect
Speaker 1: the desires of their constituents, and their constituents have had it,
Speaker 1: you know. Their constituents want to get back to normal
Speaker 1: or as close as possible, and so I think that's
Speaker 1: why the mask mandates are going away now. Like you said,
Speaker 1: we've been here before. Try to remember the week before Thanksgiving,
Speaker 1: nobody had heard of O Macron. Nobody, and we were
Speaker 1: coming out of delta and we're like great, just in
Speaker 1: times of the holidays. Well look what O Macron did
Speaker 1: to December and January just completely uh, put us right
Speaker 1: back where we were. So who knows, there could be
Speaker 1: a variant bubbling up somewhere on this planet right now
Speaker 1: that will send us into a sixth surche and we're
Speaker 1: gonna be back to square one. One of the things
Speaker 1: with the pandemic that we've been following obviously has been
Speaker 1: the health impacts of the whole thing, but the economic
Speaker 1: impact is the other half of things. And to the
Speaker 1: point of what we're talking about right this new attitude
Speaker 1: taking shape, people wanting to move on and just start
Speaker 1: getting back to normal, and even invest in themselves in
Speaker 1: their businesses. Again. You profile the guy who's runs like
Speaker 1: a restaurant bar and he's ready to open up two
Speaker 1: new locations. You know, he's not waiting for it anymore.
Speaker 1: He's kind of tired of sitting on those sidelines and
Speaker 1: is just going to go for it now. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not like he wants to open two new businesses in
Speaker 1: the middle of a pandemic. Who would want to do that.
Speaker 1: But he also isn't going to wait for an unpredictable
Speaker 1: pandemic to run his business life any longer. He went
Speaker 1: ahead with his plans, which began the middle of last year,
Speaker 1: and he's not putting them off. He does have supply
Speaker 1: chain problems a little bit, so that's going to make
Speaker 1: his life a little bit more difficult than it. What
Speaker 1: if there were no pandemic, there may still be masks
Speaker 1: on his waiters and waitresses, maybe the customers will come
Speaker 1: in with masks. But he's past the time where he's
Speaker 1: going to just not do anything because of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: If you look at the economic data that comes out
Speaker 1: every week, there are employers out there looking for hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of people to come work in their businesses,
Speaker 1: so the economy remains strong. It's finding the people to
Speaker 1: work as we move forward and try to get ourselves
Speaker 1: back to as close as we were before the man
Speaker 1: as we can before the pandemic opens up. Lenny, you've
Speaker 1: been on the podcast number of times a number of
Speaker 1: times now, and we've always talked about this kind of
Speaker 1: same general thing, right, when is it going to be over?
Speaker 1: When are we getting there? And this attitude is changing now.
Speaker 1: You you had it in your article Fatigue, frustrated and frazzled.
Speaker 1: That's what we've all been going through. A lot of
Speaker 1: people have already moved on to this next phase of
Speaker 1: just living with it. It seems like everybody else now
Speaker 1: is just catching up. The virus is not going away.
Speaker 1: It's going to become endemic. It's going to become a
Speaker 1: part of our society. What we have to do is
Speaker 1: get it to the place where we currently have the flu.
Speaker 1: It's a threat seasonally, will be vaccinated against it seasonally,
Speaker 1: if not more often than that, But it it's chances
Speaker 1: of putting us in the hospital or killing us. We'll
Speaker 1: go down and down until we don't notice it anymore
Speaker 1: than we notice the flute and that's the world we're
Speaker 1: aiming for. That's the world that people who have moved
Speaker 1: on are already feeling like they're sort of living in.
Speaker 1: Lenny Bernstein, health and medicine reporter at the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Next time, I hope we're talking about something else. I'm
Speaker 1: Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget
Speaker 1: effort today's big news stories. You can check me out
Speaker 1: on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So
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Speaker 1: your podcast.