U.S. Faces New Attitude Toward COVID

for the shifting attitude towards the pandemic. Thanks for joining us, Lenny. I wanted to bring you on to talk about the shifting attitudes again going on right now with the pandemic. You know, we've been here before where this moment where we feel the surge has been dying down, people are ready to get back to normal, you know, and then another surge comes up or something like that. So we've kind of been on this roller coaster, but right now it seems to be taking hold a little bit stronger now.

People are ready to move on. You made mention of other other news outlets writing up store easy. You know, vaxxed and done. People just being you know, we've taken all the precautions we can. We're ready to move on with all of this stuff. But Lenny, walk us through some of this. What are we seeing out there? Yeah, I think you've touched on some of the high points there. A number of things are just coming together at the

same time. Number one, we're vaccinated. Sixty of us are fully vaccinated, and then a chunk of those folks have boosters, so they're feeling pretty good about their protection. It held against O macron, certainly against severe disease and hospitalization. Yes, they may have gotten infected, but it was generally mild. If you have the vaccine and the booster and even and even those that have had natural infection already too, I mean that offers them at least some type of protection. Exactly.

Another chunk of people have had the disease and so they have natural immunity, and you can, to a certain extent, according to the research, add them to the group that's protected. The next thing is that O macron is not fading. It's dropping like a rock thirty and down week over week. That's a lot, and people are starting to feel better about the direction that's going in. You know, it's still at very high levels tod cases a day, but it's

dropping really fast. And then I think the third thing is the number of months we've been dealing with this. We're now fully into the month of this pandemic, and people are exhausted. They are more willing to take their chances now than they were I think doing any of the previous five searches. Yeah, and you know, we're seeing it reflect already in public policy. So California just recently announced that they're gonna end their indoor mask mandate for

those that are vaccinated. We're seeing a handful of Democratic states that are taking back mask mandates for schools. That shifted attitude is taking hold at the public policy level as well. You did make mention the article though we have been through this before, We've unfortunately been wrong a lot of times with these up and downs, this roller coasters.

These new variants have been pop being up, and that's one of the things that a lot of health experts still say, we don't know when that next variant could come up. Yeah, the health experts would rather that we not move quite as quickly as we are with the shedding the mask mandates that you mentioned. They would like us to be a little more cautious, but politicians reflect the desires of their constituents, and their constituents have had it,

you know. Their constituents want to get back to normal or as close as possible, and so I think that's why the mask mandates are going away now. Like you said, we've been here before. Try to remember the week before Thanksgiving, nobody had heard of O Macron. Nobody, and we were coming out of delta and we're like great, just in times of the holidays. Well look what O Macron did to December and January just completely uh, put us right

back where we were. So who knows, there could be a variant bubbling up somewhere on this planet right now that will send us into a sixth surche and we're gonna be back to square one. One of the things with the pandemic that we've been following obviously has been the health impacts of the whole thing, but the economic

impact is the other half of things. And to the point of what we're talking about right this new attitude taking shape, people wanting to move on and just start getting back to normal, and even invest in themselves in their businesses. Again. You profile the guy who's runs like a restaurant bar and he's ready to open up two new locations. You know, he's not waiting for it anymore. He's kind of tired of sitting on those sidelines and

is just going to go for it now. Yeah, it's not like he wants to open two new businesses in the middle of a pandemic. Who would want to do that. But he also isn't going to wait for an unpredictable pandemic to run his business life any longer. He went ahead with his plans, which began the middle of last year, and he's not putting them off. He does have supply chain problems a little bit, so that's going to make

his life a little bit more difficult than it. What if there were no pandemic, there may still be masks on his waiters and waitresses, maybe the customers will come in with masks. But he's past the time where he's going to just not do anything because of the pandemic. If you look at the economic data that comes out every week, there are employers out there looking for hundreds of thousands of people to come work in their businesses,

so the economy remains strong. It's finding the people to work as we move forward and try to get ourselves back to as close as we were before the man as we can before the pandemic opens up. Lenny, you've been on the podcast number of times a number of times now, and we've always talked about this kind of same general thing, right, when is it going to be over? When are we getting there? And this attitude is changing now. You you had it in your article Fatigue, frustrated and frazzled.

That's what we've all been going through. A lot of people have already moved on to this next phase of just living with it. It seems like everybody else now is just catching up. The virus is not going away. It's going to become endemic. It's going to become a part of our society. What we have to do is get it to the place where we currently have the flu. It's a threat seasonally, will be vaccinated against it seasonally, if not more often than that, But it it's chances

of putting us in the hospital or killing us. We'll go down and down until we don't notice it anymore than we notice the flute and that's the world we're aiming for. That's the world that people who have moved on are already feeling like they're sort of living in. Lenny Bernstein, health and medicine reporter at the Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Next time, I hope we're talking about something else. I'm

Oscar Ramirez 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.