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