How Pandemics End with Ellie Murray

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The COVID pandemic has been going on for more than two years. Will it ever end? It’s a question that doesn’t have a straightforward answer, as much as we all desperately want one. Dr. Ellie Murray is an epidemiology assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. She also runs the Murray Causal Decision Lab and co-hosts the “Casual Inference” podcast in partnership with the American Journal of Epidemiology. Murray joins WITHpod to discuss the importance of smart public health messaging, ethical and sociological concerns regarding the determination of “acceptable” virus case numbers and misconceptions of what endemicity means. She also talks about strategies for protecting those most at risk and why it’s possible that COVID could mutate into something much more dangerous if too much complacency continues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's absolutely within the realm of possibility that if we continue to do what we're doing,
0:05.8	basically most people back to normal, lots and lots of virus out there, it's allowed to
0:11.8	mutate, we're not really tracking cases, we're not doing very much virus sequence surveillance
0:16.8	in the US.
0:18.4	It's entirely plausible that this could mutate into something really quite a lot worse.
0:24.2	Hello, welcome to Why Is This Happening With Me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:37.2	I've had the experience a few times a lot actually in the last few weeks where I have started
0:42.3	a sentence by saying, well, since the pandemic is over, we're since the pandemic ended,
0:46.5	or something like that, and then I stop myself because the pandemic of course is very
0:49.2	much not over.
0:51.0	And every day, there's someone else I know test positive, oh, we were supposed to have
0:55.5	the cousins, we're all coming to town for the reunion, but now I've tested positive
0:59.2	and isn't that a pain.
1:00.8	And in the vast majority of cases, at least personally in the world that I've been in,
1:05.2	and people that I know and I love almost all of them are vaccinated and often boosted
1:09.3	as well.
1:10.3	They have not led to health complications.
1:12.7	They have not been severe cases that have led to hospitalization.
1:14.9	This even includes people who are immunocompromised, have survived cancer or things like that.
1:19.8	There's a variety of people's health statuses by and large in this part of the pandemic.
1:25.4	I haven't known people that have been hospitalized for severe illness.
1:29.6	And the number is basically bare that out, even though we have pretty robust transmission
	...

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