We have to do a shift. I no longer think infections generally should be the major metric.

Obviously we can continue to track infections among unvaccinated people, but we really have to focus on hospitalizations and deaths now.

This decoupling of cases and hospitalizations means we need to change our approach and look at the success of this

virus as preventing illness, not every case.

We're going to be working to unwind the sort of testing psychology that our federal leadership

has managed to unfortunately get much most of the country in over the last two years Welcome to the death panel.

It is the first free episode of the new year to support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode,

become a Patreon supporter at patreon.com slash death panel pod. This week's bonus episode was

great. It was called CDC says get back to work. And obviously we talk about the recent decision

to shorten COVID isolation guidelines in the United States.

It's a great conversation. So if you'd like to listen to that episode or any of the other

past bonus episodes, support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash death panel pod. And if you want to

help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes or follow us at Death Panel underscore.

So just to sort of start us off, I thought, you know, considering the topics we're going to

cover today, I'd lay the groundwork by just doing a brief picture of where we're at with COVID

right now in the United States.

Sure.

Because I think you kind of have to like understand the totality of that for any of this

to be interesting, right?

So as of yesterday, Wednesday, January 5th, the New York Times COVID tracker has reported

over 1,000 deaths a day for all but five of the last 138 days.

And as we've talked about before, those five days were deaths numbering like 956 or something.

...