Hi, this is Terry Mills in Bellingham, Washington, and I'm a fully grown, capable, intelligent woman who just spent half the day making Bernie Sanders memes.

This podcast was recorded at...

1.11pm on the 22nd of January.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Hopefully I'm not still making memes. Okay, here's the show!

Funny story, I was so busy looking at Bernie Sanders memes, I kind of forgot to say the time.

They're really engrossing. I, you know. Yeah, but more on that to come later in the show.

But hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamer Keith, I cover the White House.

I'm Aisha Roscoe, I also cover the White House.

And yesterday on the podcast, we talked about some of the steps that President Biden is taking to ramp up the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.

And today, we have a special guest with us to talk through where we are in the pandemic, in more detail, and also what the Biden administration is trying to do.

Selena Simmons-Duffin is from NPR's healthcare team. Hello there. Hi, Tam. So we have to start in a dark place, which is that there are now more than 400,000 deaths in the US from the coronavirus.

It is... I mean, these numbers are just stunning. And more Americans have died from it than Biden World War II.

And Joe Biden yesterday, President Biden said that we could hit 500,000 next month.

But at the same time, I think there is a little bit of a silver lining, right? That maybe we have finally, maybe possibly reached the peak in the number of cases?

Yeah, it looks like cases are starting to slow. And that's a real relief to see that. It doesn't mean that deaths are going to start to slow quite yet, because usually there's a delay.

It takes a while for people who get infected to get sick enough to maybe even die.

So it is likely that we're going to hit that 500,000 death mark. And it's something that I think we're all kind of bracing for. Half a million people in this country dead from this virus is a pretty astonishing thing.

And part of Dr. Fauci talked yesterday, he's now the chief medical advisor for President Biden. He talked about these mutations, these mutant strains of the virus.

And he said that these variants are a reason to try to make sure you're getting people vaccinated and you're wearing masks, because if you can less spread of the virus means less mutants. Is that right?

It's right. I mean, these new variants that are showing up in different places are concerning. And scientists are still trying to learn exactly how much more transmissible they are.

And whether they are more deadly, you know, how effective these authorized vaccines are going to be against them.

There's a lot of open questions and you know, doubling down on the things that we know work, like wearing masks or even doubling your mask, if you're going to be somewhere like on a plane for a while, socially distancing, washing your hands, the tried and true.

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