The *New* New Phase of the Pandemic
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
The Biden administration’s new pandemic rules and countermeasures intend to bring us into a “new phase of the pandemic.” The CDC also released new guidelines for masking, and now about 70% of Americans can go mask free. What do these new guidelines actually say about what stage of the pandemic we’re in?
Guest: Megan Ranney, emergency room doctor at Brown Emergency Medicine.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Megan, where is the weirdest place in your house that you've found a mask? |
| 0:13.8 | Oh, my goodness. |
| 0:16.1 | Probably inside my son's sock. |
| 0:22.9 | I called up Dr. Megan Ranny. |
| 0:25.3 | She's an ER physician at Brown University because I wanted to ask her what I should do now |
| 0:30.7 | with all of these masks. |
| 0:33.9 | I feel like I'm surrounded by masks. |
| 0:36.7 | Like they're in the glove compartment. |
| 0:39.6 | Like, the worst is the masks that are hanging on the knobs of the kitchen cabinets. |
| 0:45.4 | Totally. |
| 0:46.7 | Oh, they're everywhere. |
| 0:49.4 | In just a few short weeks, much of the United States has upended its relationship with masks. |
| 0:56.8 | We've reached a new moment in the fight against COVID-19, where severe cases are down to a level not seen since July of last year. |
| 1:05.6 | Just a few days ago, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new mask guidelines. Under the new guidelines, |
| 1:13.1 | most Americans and most of the country can now go mask-free. Joe Biden laid out the reasoning here |
| 1:22.0 | at the State of the Union. Based on projection, more of the country will reach a point across that point across the next couple of weeks. |
| 1:30.2 | And thanks to the progress we've made in the past year, COVID-19 no longer need control our lives. |
| 1:36.2 | More than 70% of all Americans now live in a place where, according to the federal government, masks are optional. |
| 1:44.4 | Schools and businesses are tossing out their mask requirements, too. |
| 1:48.4 | Is the CDC done with COVID? |
| 1:51.5 | Gosh, no. |
| 1:52.9 | I think that this is actually much more of the CDC recognizing that we really are at a different moment in this pandemic than we were two months ago, |
... |
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