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Hello. This is Radio Atlantic. My name is Paul Biciglio. I'm a deputy editor at The Atlantic, where I oversee our health science and technology coverage.

With me today is one of our staff writers who reports on health and science, Katie Wu. Katie, hello.

Hello, Paul. How are you?

It's good. It's good. The last time I saw you was in person for the very first time.

Which is appalling because we have worked together for almost two years now, and you neglected me for most of those two years.

Not you, but we've been in this for a while. This is in part because of what we're here to talk about today, which is the pandemic.

The holidays are coming up. People want to be prepared and safe. There's a big question here. How worried should we be that things are going to get worse again?

Oh, gosh. I mean, it depends what you mean by worse. I would say things are already pretty bad right now, depending on where your threshold is.

A lot remains really unclear, and I certainly don't want to get into the business of predicting the future.

You know, first, some perspective, I think there's a lot to be thankful for this year. If we sort of compare this to past winters, you know, we have vaccines, we have treatments.

And a lot of people are gearing up for a holiday season that could feel a lot like the ones that we had before the pandemic started. I mean, I'm certainly looking forward to that.

At the same time, though, there are still people dying from COVID, and there are a lot of other respiratory viruses really hitting the country hard right now.

And it's kind of unclear how quickly that's going to abate. I think that is really going to cast a bit of a shadow over the holidays this year.

Why don't we sort of step back and kind of take stock of where we're at in the pandemic, and what we might be able to say about where all this is headed.

Let's talk about variants. I think anybody listening should be forgiven if they've sort of lost track of variants at this point.

Let's ask a quick sort of encapsulation of the trajectory of variants. You know, we've gone through a couple in the past, and we've been sort of stuck in the year of Omicron.

Yeah, so it's actually helpful. I think if we sort of break the pandemic down into three very, very, very rough phases.

If we remember all the way back to 2020, we were for the most part just dealing with one version of the virus.

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