What's different now is instead of one variant at a time that we can talk about, okay, delta and now Omicron, and then even within that, BA1, BA2, BA5, now it's not one thing.

It's not one thing in any one place, and it's certainly not one thing around the world.

So instead of having one variant that would kind of come along

and rise really quickly, causing a very distinct and large peak, and then descend to be replaced

by the next thing that came along, instead of large tsunamis and, you know, waves of various

height, it's a rising sea level and then high and low tide. The Welcome to the death panel to support the show and get access to our second weekly

bonus episode, become a patron at patreon.com slash deathpanel pod.

And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about

your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of health communism from your local bookstore, or request

it from your local library, and follow us at Deaf Panel underscore.

So I am here today with my guest, Professor Ryan Gregory.

He is a biologist and professor at University of Guelph in Canada who primarily researches

genomic evolution.

And I've asked him to come on the show to talk about the most recent variant of COVID

that is surging,

called XBB1.5. Professor Gregory, welcome to the death panel. It's so great to have you here.

Thank you so much for inviting me. So, Ryan, I'm really glad to have you here so that we can

have a frank discussion about the latest variant that everyone is talking about. And I want us to not just talk

about this in the way that it's usually sort of discussed, which is a sort of like, is this going to be

as bad as the last one? And that's the only metric that we sort of use to understand what the

importance or significance of the virus is.

And I think ultimately what I want us to talk about today is not just XBB1.5,

...