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death panel underscore so today it's just the three of us and we are going to talk about herd immunity

but before we get into that i want to first quickly check in on the state of the pandemic and

lay out the context for where we are right now.

So in the United States, now more than 94% of the population lives in an area that has

substantial or high transmission levels.

Even the pastel community level map that is designed to make the pandemic look more mild is starting

to turn red in places like Puerto Rico, the northeast, the Midwest, Hawaii. And I do want to stress

that this wave is not regionally confined. It is all over the map. If you look at the transmission

level map, the old map that is still up shows that

it is clear that cases are all across the United States right now. And wastewater data, which

doesn't rely on testing and reporting, is also increasing. So that kind of confirms the fact that we

are in the middle of a invisible wave, as we covered on our main feed episode last week. And hospitalizations are

increasing. This is the fourth week in a row. So this is happening nationally. And last week, nearly

2,000 people died. So this is sort of where we're at right now. And we also just got March

breakthrough data. Yeah. I was going to say I wanted to add to that. We now have

kind of a brief update, at least on the breakthrough death situation. So previously on the show,

we've highlighted that according to CDC data in January and February of this year, around 40%

of COVID deaths were in people who were fully vaccinated. That includes in February 15% of U.S. COVID deaths were in people who were boosted. That includes in February, 15% of U.S. COVID deaths were in people

who were boosted. And a few days ago on May 20th, the CDC updated this data set to include

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