About the pandemic, as August comes to a close, we are not at all where people thought we might be in this country by now.

We all know that. It was only last month, early July, doesn't it seem like a long time ago, when it looked like it was really fading, at least in places with lots of vaccinated people.

But the transmissibility of Delta and widespread vaccine refusal

have gotten us back to where we were last winter. The numbers are all the way back to where

we were. A thousand deaths every day from COVID nationwide, over 100,000 hospitalizations now.

This doesn't mean that the pandemic won't end, however. My next guest,

Ed Young, thinks it will now end differently. Atlantic Magazine Science writer Ed Young has done so

much good reporting and good thinking about the virus since the beginning, and his latest article

is called How the Pandemic Now Ends.

Ed, thanks for your work and thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hi, thanks for having me again. So last year when Trump was still trying to deny reality,

you wrote that the U.S. was locked in a pandemic spiral. Are we still in a pandemic spiral?

And if so, is it the same one? I think we are. I was trying to suggest back then that we keep

on making the same mistakes again and again that lead to bad outcomes. And out of the nine that I identified, the first one was what I called a serial monogamy of solutions,

that we would only bounce from one possible control measure to the other and put all of our eggs in that basket.

We're still doing that.

We have done that arguably for much of this year

in prioritising vaccines over other things and like even casting them in opposition to things

like masks so that getting your shot was seen as taking your mask off was almost seen as a reward

for getting your shot. That I think was folly even then. And I think

it just cannot work in the Delta error. Delta is so transmissible that it cannot be controlled

through vaccines alone. Now, that's not to say that vaccines are unimportant. They are

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