Who gets to stop thinking about the pandemic
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two years in, many Americans are ready to leave the pandemic behind. But some people don’t have that luxury — like the immunocompromised, parents of small children and covid “long-haulers.” Today on the show, what it means to “live with covid.”
Read more:
It’s been two years since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Today on Post Reports, we take stock of how far we’ve come … and how far we still have to go.
For many around the country, the pandemic is starting to feel like a thing of the past. In red and blue states alike, masks are coming off and vaccine requirements are relaxing. But for some — including the immunocompromised and parents of young kids — the pandemic is far from over.
Health reporter Fenit Nirappil explains what it means for the virus to become endemic, and how the United States is looking to return to normalcy after two years of covid-19 mitigation efforts.
Meanwhile, potentially hundreds of thousands of people are experiencing symptoms of long covid, months — or even years — after they were first exposed. And as the world tries to move on, they’re trying not to fall through the gaps in the social safety net.
Business reporter Chris Rowland talks about the covid “long-haulers” struggling to get the disability benefits they — and their doctors —think they’re due.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So this morning, I decided to go into my Gmail and to look up all the emails that I got |
| 0:08.0 | on March 11, 2020, exactly two years ago today, because I wanted to remind myself of exactly |
| 0:15.9 | how that strange, scary day played out, like this accidental time capsule in my inbox. |
| 0:23.6 | First there was the message from my dentist saying that they were indefinitely postponing |
| 0:28.4 | my appointments. |
| 0:30.0 | Then there was a news alert about the World Health Organization officially declaring |
| 0:33.9 | the coronavirus to be a pandemic. |
| 0:36.6 | There was a message from our newsroom union telling us to prepare to work from home. |
| 0:42.0 | But I remember the thing that really did it for me, that really made me feel like the |
| 0:46.7 | world was falling apart, was the message from the organizer of my book club. |
| 0:52.7 | It was one line and it said, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say book club is canceled. |
| 0:58.0 | In the two years since that day, so much has happened. |
| 1:04.7 | There has been this global tragedy of six million people dying. |
| 1:10.3 | But there's also been private, more ordinary tragedies that are harder to quantify, losing |
| 1:15.6 | precious time with family, missing out on an FU's first years, or a grandparents' last |
| 1:21.6 | ones. |
| 1:23.8 | Basically, as restrictions are lifted and people start to return to life as normal, it feels |
| 1:28.9 | like these two tragedies are in conflict with one another. |
| 1:33.4 | That if we want to travel for the holidays or attend a wedding or go to a restaurant for |
| 1:38.6 | a birthday party, that all comes at the expense of the safety of vulnerable people. |
| 1:45.1 | And that painful push and pull is what I'm thinking about a lot to years in. |
| 1:54.1 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
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