Welcome to the ticket. I'm Isaac Dauver.

250,000 Americans have now died of COVID.

250,000.

The spread of the virus is as bad as it's ever been, and it's almost certainly going to get

much worse.

But with the present and abdicating responsibility and refusing to begin a transition, it feels as if we're headed into

unthinkable danger without any sense of who's in charge or where we're even charging

toward. With the election now behind us, I wanted to mark this moment in the pandemic and try to understand how we got here and where things could go next.

In other words, how many people are going to die because of what's happening in politics right now?

That is a political question, but first and foremost, it's a science question.

And to help me answer that is science writer Ed Young.

Ed is a fellow staff writer with me here at the Atlantic, but he's also emerged as a leading voice on the coronavirus.

He wrote a piece for us two years ago, arguing that America was less prepared for a pandemic than we thought.

When the virus emerged, he came back from

book leave to become a full-time pandemic reporter. His work these past few months has been at the

forefront of the conversation, but he'll be the first to tell you he'd love to one day get back to what he was doing before all this

Ed explains how America got to this point what he thinks a Biden administration could do come January

and why he's more hopeful about a society sticking together amid a disease

than he was when he wrote that piece in 2018. Take a listen.

Ed Young, thank you for being here on the ticket. Yeah, thanks for having me.

So let's talk about this book that you were working on before the world changed that was not anything like

a pandemic reporting beat.

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