This is a word a podcast from Slate. I'm your host Jason Johnson. After two years of pandemic restrictions many Americans are back in the office in restaurants and other crowded spaces.

Often while leaving mass at home, but with infections rising doctors are warning that although we may be over the COVID crisis, it's not over for us.

When your children are going to school and there's no ventilation in that school district and they are bringing that virus back into the home, those are the types of things that lead to black and brown people being more likely to be infected.

Bracing for a pandemic surge, coming up on a word with me Jason Johnson, stay with us.

Welcome to a word a podcast about race and politics and everything else. I'm your host Jason Johnson.

Vigilance about COVID has been on the decline for months in the US. Millions of Americans are back to work in person and massive become optional.

Empolicy and practice. Even in locations with little social distance and a fair number of at-risk people.

But President Biden's COVID infection has served as a wake up call. In the cities like Dallas, San Francisco, and New York, the new BA-5 variant is pushing infection rates up again.

Even as many of the community efforts to fight the virus are disappearing.

So is the danger of COVID a thing of the past? Or is the US setting itself up to fall prey to another coronavirus spike?

And might that leave black and other marginalized people in trouble? Joining us to talk about is Dr. Ebony Hilton. She's a practicing physician and a frequent medical analyst for MSNBC.

Dr. Ebony Hilton, welcome to a word.

His skirt is a U2.

You've been sounding the alarm on social media that the country is unprepared for COVID. I follow you online and you're like, keep your mask on. This is dangerous.

What's leading you to that sort of sense of alarm? Is it what you're seeing locally? Is it the data you're seeing nationally? Is it a combination of both?

Why have you sort of been banging the drums about this so intensely?

I think it's because I actually respect what viruses do historically. It's not just COVID-19.

And I think that's the problem is that we fail to learn from history. But what we do know is that viruses cause a list of problems within your bodily functions.

That's not just solely related to death. When I see people in the hospital for various disease processes, we see that viruses have led to cancers with the viruses that were common back in the 60s and 70s.

And now we're seeing those people needing liver transplants, for instance, because they never know a longer words.

We've seen viruses historically cause young people to come in and needing heart transplants because it scars the heart and the function of the heart.

It's a number of different things that viruses lead to that I was definitely afraid of when it came down to COVID-19 because not only were we seeing high death rates, but we also saw people early on saying, hey, I can't taste or smell anymore.

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