Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee on the State of the Pandemic

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

After a year of battling COVID-19, parts of the United States are celebrating a gradual turn toward normalcy, but the pandemic isn’t over—and it may never be over, exactly. Atul Gawande tells David Remnick that a hard core of vaccine resisters, along with reservoirs of the virus in domestic animals, may make herd immunity elusive. Rather, he says, the correct goal is to bring the impact of COVID-19 down to that of something like the flu. Meanwhile, India is now overwhelmed by a devastating death toll, reported at around four thousand per day but likely much higher. Siddhartha Mukherjee, who reported on the pandemic in developing nations, says that commitments from the West such as extra doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will barely scratch the surface. A national mobilization will be required to even begin to flatten the curve.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Last week, I called up Aitul Gawande to talk about COVID in the United States and in India.
0:27.3	My father comes from a village in the state of Maharashtra, which is the hardest hit state so far.
0:30.3	And my mother's from Gujarat, where we also still have family.
0:34.6	So I've been in regular contact getting WhatsApp updates.
0:35.2	What are you hearing?
0:43.2	Well, you know, it has totally flipped from the period when we were having 300,000 to 400,000 infections a day, and now it's the other way around.
0:47.3	And it is running through entire households like wildfire.
0:51.6	I have elderly relatives who've ended up in the hospital and made it through,
0:56.9	and then a cousin my age, who I never would have thought would have been hit so bad,
1:01.2	and he died. And he died from this. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. And I think, you know,
1:07.8	and I'm nothing compared to what I know of other families and what they're going through.
1:15.2	Atul Gawanda is a surgeon in Boston, and he runs a company called CIC Health, which provides COVID-19 testing and vaccines.
1:23.6	He's also a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker and an expert on public health.
1:28.9	The big difference from the United States experience is that you have such a fragile and underfunded health care system.
1:40.3	And, you know, the hospitals just became overrun and overwhelmed, and it really has had this feeling of being on your own.
1:49.7	That said, in Maharashtra, where the infection started, they have plateaued, and the cases have started to come down as people locked down.
1:58.4	And the core lesson is we do know how to stop this.
2:03.1	We're going to come back to the situation in India, which is really dire, but I want to ask you first
2:08.5	about the United States.
2:10.4	For close to a year now, all we could think about was, when are we going to get a vaccine?
2:15.2	And now, at this point, more than 100 million Americans are vaccinated,
	...

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