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Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Monday, April 11th,

2022. I'm John Puthore. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive

editor, a greenwald hi-a. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosen, hi Christine. Hi John.

And associate editor, no Rothman, hi Noah. John? So much going on. Here's what I maybe we should

start with. There is now a complete breakdown in the narrative of COVID cases leading to hospitalizations

leading to deaths because what we have now going on is COVID case numbers rising while hospitalization

and hospitalizations and deaths keep falling. Hospitalizations are at their lowest number.

Since people started measuring hospitalizations for COVID in either June or July of 2021,

the death toll is now down about 500 today, which is of course horrible. Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying it's not horrible, but it's not 1500 today. And the COVID case numbers are up

in part because the Omacron BA2 variant is infectious enough that it can evade vaccination. So you are,

for example, you are 10 times more likely to get very, very sick from COVID if you were unvaccinated.

But you are three times as likely to get COVID if you're unvaccinated as a case. So in other words,

in case numbers, you're far more likely to to contract COVID without any increase in mortality

or severity of the case because the vaccines prevent you from getting sick, but they don't seem to

prevent you or prevent a lot of people from getting BA2. So we now have a total

complete break between getting COVID and getting sick and dying. I mean, it's not a complete

break, but it's as close to being a break as you could possibly want, which means that the pandemic

is over and the endemic is here. And even Anthony Fauci said this weekend, with his peculiar

inconsistency having said a couple of weeks ago, we're probably going to have to put our mask back on.

He said, this is not going to be eradicated and it's not going to be eliminated. And what's going

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