It's Tuesday, July 27th. I'm Kila Hughes. And I'm getting a rest of the second. This is what the day, the only podcast that is recorded on the beach that makes you old.

Yeah, it's either that or doing the news makes us age a lot faster.

Yeah, if that's true, I've just been going to a normal beach to do this podcast every day for two years.

I mean, at least you're a local, you know, people know you there now.

On today's show, LaVar Burton hosts his first episode of Jeopardy. Plus Kanye West has taken up residence in the same arena where he held a listening party for his upcoming album.

I mean, that is fascinating for sure. But first, we're going to dive in on the pandemic and mandates.

So we're going to start with masks in the US. So last week, we talked about LA being the first major US county to reinstate a mask mandate for indoor public spaces and that more mandates might be on the way.

Well, since then, cities like St. Louis, Missouri and Savannah, Georgia have imposed their own. And nationally, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday that federal public health officials were also thinking about updating their guidance for when and where the vaccinated should wear masks in public.

Jake, this is on the active consideration. If you're asking about part of the discussion, yes, I am.

Okay, so that is where it stands with mask mandates, but with lagging vaccinations across the country and the rapid, dangerous spread of the Delta variant, there's a new mandate to be aware of.

So some cities and states and agencies are moving towards vaccine mandates. Gideon, tell us about that.

Yeah, well, we can kind of look at an example of what it looks like from overseas to know how it could look here.

Last week, France mandated health workers to be vaccinated by mid September and starting on August 1st for the general public, people would effectively be barred from lots of indoor public settings we know and love if they couldn't show proof of vaccination or a negative test.

Almost immediately two things happened. The country saw more people signing up to get shots like a lot, a lot, a lot. So success, but also a lot of protests. So you take your lumps. And nearby Italy has also taken a similar approach.

Now, the US is not at that point yet, but yesterday might have brought us a little bit closer for one thing nearly 60 medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association called for this nationwide mandate that all health care workers be vaccinated.

Independently, that has become a requirement for a lot of hospitals across the country, but it is far from uniform. For example, the CDC estimates that a little less than 60% of nursing home staff have been fully vaccinated at this point.

That is incredibly irresponsible. There's a new policy by the Department of Veterans Affairs. That's right. So they became the first federal agency to issue any kind of vaccination mandate.

VA Secretary Dennis McDonough told The New York Times that beginning tomorrow, actually about 115,000 frontline health care workers are going to have eight weeks to get fully vaccinated or they could face potential removal from their jobs.

Those kinds of workers include doctors, dentists and nurses right now are probably about 70% of workers in the Department's health care centers have been fully vaccinated.

All right. That's encouraging. Then what about on the more local level? Like what vaccine mandates have been announced so far?

So two pretty big examples here. Let's start with New York City where Mayor Bill DeBlosio made this announcement yesterday for city employees on September 13th. The entire city workforce will be mandated under the COVID safety mandate.

To either get vaccinated, which is far preferable or get tested once a week. This will apply to about 340,000 municipal workers and it's meant to be time to the reopening of schools in the city.

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