Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday and it's the second of August. I'm Nyla

Buu. Here's what we're watching today. The Biden administration's messy COVID messaging.

And why the pandemic means less long-distance romance. But first, today's one big thing,

a reality check on the Delta variant.

You may have seen the pretty scary headlines this weekend about the Delta variant of COVID-19.

One of those was out of Florida, which hit the highest daily total of new COVID cases since

the pandemic began. And last Wednesday, Texas reported more than 10,000 new COVID cases.

It's highest total for a single day since February. And here in DC, the indoor mask mandate for those

who are vaccinated went back into effect as it did for many other parts of the country.

And so my big question after all of this is, what is going on with the Delta variant?

For the first half of today's podcast, we're going to be talking about what we know and what we do

not know and how the messaging from the Biden administration has added to the confusion.

With Julie Robner, whose chief Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News and host of KHN's What the

Health Podcast. Good morning, Julie. Good morning. Julie, I imagine you like me have a lot of

questions about everything from this weekend. Can we start with the breakthrough cases?

Just how likely are those four people who are vaccinated?

They're actually still very unlikely. They're more likely for Delta than they were for previous

variants. But we keep seeing these sort of alarming headlines. But the things that we know about

the vaccines, they still work really well, including against the Delta variant. Even if you get a

breakthrough case, your chances of being hospitalized or God forbid dying are way smaller, like 25 times

smaller if you're vaccinated than if you're not. And you know, we saw all these sort of crazy

headlines about how, you know, it's as contagious as chickenpuck, which it is. Yeah, is that true?

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