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and a short history of trans misogyny at your local bookstore or request them at your local

library and follow us at Death Panel underscore. I'm Beecher Suther Bolton and today I'm joined by

my co-hosts, Artie Vierkant. Hello. And Abby Cardis. Hello. And the three of us are going to be checking in on

COVID. We're going to be talking about the recent resurgence of the social distancing debate.

The pandemic is still ongoing. People are still getting sick, getting long COVID, being

hospitalized, dying. Wastewater levels are up, particularly in the Western United States.

As we discussed in our episode called Economic Endemicity Blue, the wastewater surveillance system has some serious limitations

in terms of what it can tell us. The system is incomplete and there is inherent bias built

into the data that excludes people not hooked up to the grid, like with septic systems,

or places where there's no data at all,

like North Dakota, Mississippi, or Puerto Rico.

And as we'll be talking about in a moment, the three versus six feet debate is back.

Recent congressional testimony by former NIH director Anthony Fauci has reignited the discourse

around whether social distancing was quote-unquote worth the cost.

Now, this resurgence is only due in part to Fauci's testimony, in which he said that the

six-foot benchmark for U.S. social distancing recommendations, quote, sort of just appeared.

But I think the credit for re-centering this in the public debate is also due in no small part to reporting on Fauci's comment,

specifically reporting that was published in the Washington Post on June 2nd, written by Dan Diamond,

that essentially portrayed this comment on the social distancing recommendations as novel and new information, and also portrayed the

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