Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Wednesday, July 14, 2021.

It is also best deal day and it is also my son's 11th birthday. He's not listening to this because he's he's in camp in Wisconsin and wouldn't be listening to this anyway.

So because he has better things to do with this time like play Minecraft and eat waffles but he is not doing either because he's in camp in Wisconsin.

And Christine Rosen is out today so with us one of our favorite columnists and frequent podcast guests James B. Meg's our tech commentary columnist Ty Jim how are you?

I'm doing great great to be here again.

And of course with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald who's a little under the weather hi Abe hi John so you may hear him you may hear him a little under the weather he and and associate editor no Rothman hi Noah hi John.

So Jim the Delta variant which we look I called it the Delta variant without saying the highly contagious Delta variant.

Now I've just said it is highly contagious and we are seeing this surgeon cases nationally we're now up I think it's like 90% or something from two weeks ago according to these numbers.

And for the first day if you use the New York Times tracker for the first day the death toll has a you know has taken a worry a worry some trend upward that it was it was really in the high 100 to the low 200s and we're now up in the mid 300s again as a daily toll.

And all of the deaths and when I say all the deaths I mean 99.5% of all the deaths now are among the unvaccinated and my guess is that.

And overwhelming number of the cases that we're seeing are entirely among the unvaccinated because we're really not hearing about a lot of breakthrough cases except anecdotally in other countries and I've been in our country like we've heard about some Israel and some in in Britain but not here so.

As our resident science skeptic analyst you know hard data guy where where you want all of this my high school algebra teacher would be really amused here you describe me as your your data guy but you're better you're better than we are let me put it that way well you remember one of the first columns I wrote for commentary was about how journalist as a whole are bad at math and science and I think we all.

Need a little humility when when we look at numbers but the Delta variant is serious you know I think we all felt that there was a lot of hype around one variant after another and there's a big constituency out there that wants to always see imminent doom around the corner and that there was a lot of almost yeah I think the press almost a yearning for bad news even as things were going very well with COVID.

But the Delta variant is a big challenge there was a study out of China a few days ago that showed that people with the Delta variant had roughly a thousand times more virus in their systems than than the viral load on.

Patients or our carriers in the early phases of the covid 19 pandemic so that's really worrisome it seems to setting more quickly about two days faster than the early versions of covid which implies that it's more contagious quicker and we know that a lot of the cases from covid are being transmitted when people are.

Are asymptomatic or pre symptomatic so anything that means a higher viral load hitting people faster is is worrisome and that's probably what accounts for a it's increased transmissibility anywhere from in the 40s to 90% according to a British study so so it is serious and and we're seeing the impact of its increased transmissibility but we have a solution to this and what.

So maddening about what's going on right now in the US is that we shouldn't have to worry about the Delta variant I mean the vaccines work they work against they work well against it it really helps to have your both doses because it's only having one dose it does not seem to be as effective against the Delta variant as it was against previous variants single dose seem to be pretty darn effective but not with the Delta variant so the virus is very important.

So the virus is in a sense is getting smarter and this is something we would expect to happen getting more transmissible and we're going to see what's sad here is we're going to see this Delta variant burned through these communities with low vaccination rates and the kind of herd immunity we would have expected you know if you're a lot of people were really hopeful that with between people getting vaccinated and a lot of people having already had a COVID 19 we would see a kind of early rough herd immunity.

So we're going to see a lot of herd immunity setting in but the Delta variant challenges that it means that you know even if if two out of the three people around you are are have some kind of immunity whether from a vaccine or from a previous infection that may not be enough to mean that you're relatively safe and it's also because unvaccinated people are going to tend to cluster in families and social groups and communities.

So we're going to be giving themselves a situation that's really prone to easy transmission of this this virus so you know we're not out of the woods yet and and that's what makes it so frustrating that there's this weird backlash against vaccines in so many parts of our country.

Even we shouldn't overstate the extent to which vaccine vaccinations have been embraced by the vast majority of this population even in places that have clusters of unvaccinated people most of the really vulnerable population the people who made up the majority of the of the death rate in 2020 and early 2021 have been vaccinated.

Even in states where the vaccination rate is a little bit lower like Missouri say the vaccination rates for people over over 65 are pretty good I think you know almost everywhere the vaccination rates for people over 65 or about 75% are better I think Arkansas might be an outlier on the on the low end in you know in the 60s or something like that so yeah that's that's an important consideration I think where we're seeing more of the vaccine hesitancy is in the vaccine.

...