It's Thursday, August nineteen. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. COVID booster shots are coming this fall. The Biden administration has called for boosters to be available for those that are fully vaccinated with Fiser or Maderna eight months after their second shot with the Delta variant. The coronavirus is still too widespread and too transmissible, and the outcome of the pandemic seems pretty certain. The virus is not going
away and will be endemic. Sarah Zang, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins us for how we are going to have to live with the coronavirus. Thanks for joining us, Sarah, Hi, thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about some of the latest coronavirus news. The Biden administration has called for a third COVID booster shot starting in the fall for adults who got the either the Fiser or the Maderna vaccine. So we're looking at these shots being administered
eight months after you got your second dose. This is for ages eighteen and older, So they want to start this around the week of sept Member, and we've seen a lot of data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines have kind of worn off a little bit when it comes to the delta variant. It's still protects very well against hospitalization, severe disease, and death, but the delta variant just kind of throw everything for a loop. So
what are we seeing in this, Sarah? That's exactly all right, you know, as you say, the vaccines still protect really well against hospitalizations and death, but it is pretty clear that the vaccine is not effective right now against delta
as it was when we're seeing the clinical trials. So the rationale is coming from the Biden administration is that we want to boost people back up to kind of a level where we feel more confident in And I think the other fear is that, you know, maybe it's still protecting really well against serious disease now, but where is this going to look Maybe another six months or eight months from now. And I think like in the US,
we certainly have the shots. Of fact, we have more shots than people are willing to take them right now. But I think that's actually maybe one of the other kind of bigger pictures they're listening here, is that a third shot will undoubtedly help boostupt the community of people who take it, but the first shot for someone who has not been vaccine is going to make much much bigger of a difference. So there should we be focusing
their efforts on getting first shot to more people. And I think the other big picture question is the rest of the world, so much for the role, still does not have enough access vaccines to vaccine everyone even once. So this is really in some ways reflecting how we in the US are very lucky to be a Washington vaccines. It would certainly help, but is it maybe the best
use of a single disa vaccine. Probably not right exactly, And as you mentioned, just a response to delta rising cases rising hospitalizations, you know, if you are going to get this third dose, it does have to be from the same vaccine that you took before, so fiser or MODERNA people that got Johnson and Johnson will have to wait. They're still looking at the data for that to see what they want to do. But the inclination seems to be that people that got Johnson and Johnson will also
need a booster shot. All of this goes to say, is kind of how we're going through this. Sarah, about a year ago, you wrote an article talking about how the coronavirus is probably never going to go away. It will become something that we call endemic, something that we
end up living with. You wrote a follow up article to this kind of how everything we've gone through basically confirms it's almost to this point now things have not gotten much better, and we're still there, and we hope that through natural immunity through vaccinations, the coronavirus just kind of becomes more of a common cold thing like other
coronaviruses have done in the past. Yeah, that's right. The coronavirus is still never going away, and I think that's even more clearer or clearer now than it was a
year ago. So I think the reason I would say that seems, you know, even more unavoidable now is because the virus has just spread so through so much of the world, and we're also seeing how it is changing, right Like we're seeing these new variants and with delta there's like some better ability to slightly variability or reinfect which are caused breakthrough infections and people who are vaccinated, which is as we're talking about. One reason the Biden
industration is pushing for boosters. I think we're going through like a very confusing period where things are very influx. I wanted to kind of think about what the long term is of like living with this virus is like. And I don't think that currently confusing period is going to last forever. At least eventually we'll kind of still dance to some sort of more stable, steady state where the virus kind of follows a more predictable pattern, very
likely or possibly a seasonal pattern. To see with the way we see with the flu with other corner virus is therefore other cornerviruses cause a common cold, and we don't know if this cornavirus is going to behave exactly like the ones that already exist, but we have kind of just as like one possible benchmark for how it might look in the long term. With the common cold, coronavirus is we sort of all get them when we're
a kid. We probably exposed to them like before we were two or three years old, and then we always get reinfected. Immunity to coronavirus does not last very long. But what happens is because we always get it as a kid, it's pretty mild. As we're seeing with COVID nineteen. When kids get it tends to be really mildly symptomatic. So what tends to happen with other coronaviruses is that, um, we get it as a kid, we get reinfected. But that's also violent because our bodies have seen it before.
Maybe the virus changes a little bit, maybe your immunity deal so waynes might get reinfected again. That kind of boost back the community back up for a while, and then maybe after some time you might get reinfected again. But each time these reinfections, you're not starting from zero, so it's going to be milder than if you saw it for the first time. And if you are vaccinated or it's happening in children, that's not as serious as
what's happening now with COVID nineteen. The problem with COVID nineteam is that we're seeing novel coronavirus in adults who have never seen this virus before, and that's what is causing all the serious illness and the death. And that's the whole point. As you were mentioning, you know that pattern that we have dealt with coronavirus is before the whole point of getting the vaccines going was to help us in that not to completely eliminated or you know,
stop it completely. It was basically to help us from getting severe infections, help us from dying from it. So we're kind of in that position right now. That's why we're trying to get so many people vaccinated. The other component to it, as you mentioned in the article too, is the psychological transition. You know, once this does become endemic something that we live with, we're going to have to think about it differently as a way do we
live for it. You know, we've been in this inflection point right now where so many people are on so many sides. We're not in agreement on what it's going to look like later, but eventually we'll kind of get there. Yeah, yeah, you know, I think one thing that's going to just feel a little bit strange at first when we come out of this pandemic is that, you know, in this mill of this pandemic or in this emergency, we're all
trying to avoid this virus. But in the long run, as this virus becomes endemic, as it can need to circulate, we've seen how transmissible it is. Now like it's very unlikely that all of us or even most of us can avoid this virus for the rest of our lives, so we should have prepared to be exposed to it
at some point. And that's fine, right if you've been vaccinated, if you've had immunity to this virus, like reinfection is not going to be as bad as like an initial first infection and saying an elderly adult who's never seen the virus before, and that's just probably how it's going to be over time. Well, we hope that we do increase the vaccinations and more and more people don't get severely ill from this. As we mentioned, booster shots are coming.
We'll have to deal with all of that, and it's going to be something that we're gonna have to live with for a long time. Sarah Zang, staff writer at The Atlantic, Thank you very much for joining us, Oh, thank you for having me here. I'm Oscar Mirrors and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.