Ed Yong on ‘How the Pandemic Now Ends’

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

“The ‘zero COVID’ dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy,” writes the Atlantic’s Ed Yong in his most recent piece, “How the Pandemic Now Ends.” Yong, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on COVID-19, updates his seminal March 2020 article “How the Pandemic Will End” in wake of the delta variant. Vaccines alone will not end the pandemic, he writes — the pandemic will now never fully end, it will mutate into an endemic. But how long it takes for that to happen depends on mitigation efforts — many of which have been eschewed by state and local governments in an attempt to return to “normalcy.” He joins us to discuss this stage of the pandemic’s estimated impacts on hospitals and vulnerable populations as well as how we’ll reach the light at the end of the tunnel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:00.2	Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. And joining us now is Ed Young, staff writer for the Atlantic.
1:07.0	He's written a new piece titled How the Pandemic Now Ends. And we'll talk to him about the stage of the pandemic we're in and how it is now likely to end with the rise of the Delta variant. Welcome back to forum, Ed Young.
1:20.6	Hi. Thanks for having me. Really glad to have you on. You've described us as now in a fourth stage and that we got to the stage in the pandemic
1:31.5	because of some destructive instincts similar to the ones that got us into the first three stages.
1:38.5	What did we do wrong in the last several months, Ed Young?
1:43.1	I think probably the most significant thing was that we put all of our eggs in one basket.
1:50.0	And that would be vaccination.
1:52.0	I think America pursued a strategy of vaccination almost to the exclusion of other things.
1:58.0	We had a few months ago the CDC deciding that announcing that
2:03.3	vaccine fully vaccinated people no longer needed to mask indoors and that sort of traded off
2:08.5	some of our most effective tools masking vaccines against each other rather than using them together.
2:14.0	This is something that I actually warned about last September. I said that we almost practiced
2:20.0	like serial monogamy with our solutions. We could only focus on one at a time. And that's,
	...

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