Consider This from NPR - New Phase Of Pandemic Met With Confusion And Exhaustion

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

The United States has reached yet another turning point in this pandemic—one that may feel particularly unrelenting and confusing.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. On Monday, Kansas City, Missouri joined the ranks of cities that are reinstating an indoor mask mandate for all residents, whether they're vaccinated or not. It's just this feeling like I'm getting flung back into this horror film that I don't want to be a part of anymore. Crystal Wilmore told Frank Morris of KCUR that although the city isn't in lockdown again, even the return of some COVID restrictions feels like a nightmare. And it's not just residents who are feeling this way. Local businesses aren't crazy about the news either. It was kind of like, oh boy, here it comes again. Kate Blackman is a server at Wineworks in Kansas City.

She says the reinstated mask mandate will mean more hassles with customers, which will cost her tips. She's really upset, but she doesn't blame the public officials. I'm angry at the people who aren't getting vaccinated walking amongst us without their masks on because they can get away with it. Missouri right now in its public response is a disaster. That's Kansas City Mayor Quentin Lucas. Because of the highly contagious Delta variant, cases are up almost 800 percent in the city since early June. And the fully vaccinated rate in Missouri is just over

40 percent, which is well below the national average. We are in an embarrassing position, a frustrating and disappointing position in Missouri. I need to take steps to keep our folks safe. Lucas says he's following the lead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which updated its masking guidance just last week. The CDC is now saying that even vaccinated people are at risk of spreading the Delta variant. That's why masking is recommended regardless of vaccination status. But there's a caveat. The guidance is for areas in the country where the spread of the virus is, quote, substantial or high. That is really giving people some homework to do.

And who likes to get up first thing in the morning and see what the levels of transmission are in your community? That's Dr. Ranit Mishori, professor of family medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. I strongly believe that masking up is the essential thing to do to combat this highly infectious variant that we have now, the Delta variant. But how it was communicated was indeed confusing. Consider this. The pandemic is in a new and dangerous phase that feels an awful lot like past phases we've already lived through.

But this time, there seems to be more confusion and more exhaustion. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Monday, August 2nd. Support for NPR and the following message come from First Republic Bank. First Republic provides tailored financial solutions with extraordinary personal service designed to change the way you feel about banking. Learn more at firstrepublic.com. Member FDIC. Equal housing lender.

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Wyzant, a one-to-one tutoring alternative to online classes. Offering live, online, personalized lessons in more than 300 subjects. Head to wyzant.com. Because at Wyzant, we take learning personally. NPR's Planet Money Summer School is now in session. Everything you want to know about investing from expert guest professors. New classes every Wednesday till Labor Day in the Planet Money podcast feed. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, the CDC's updated guidance to return to masking was based in part on data from a COVID outbreak last month in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's a popular

vacation spot on Cape Cod. And the study looked at 469 reported cases. Three quarters of those cases were fully vaccinated people. And all of this unfolded in a state where almost 70% of eligible adults were vaccinated. Another sobering detail, the study didn't find a significant difference in viral load. That's the amount of virus an infected person is carrying. When it came to fully vaccinated people versus unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people. It is not a welcomed piece of news that masking is going to be a part of people's lives who have already been vaccinated. That's CDC Director Rochelle Walensky last week. Along with the updated masking guidance, the agency also recommended that students and employees at K-12 schools wear masks this upcoming school year.

The science continues to change. Here's Walensky on Friday speaking with Fox News. And while that is neither simple nor easy to convey, it's my responsibility to keep the American people safe. And as that science... COVID is going to be with us forever. Dr. Amish Adulja is an infectious disease doctor at Johns Hopkins University. This is a new respiratory virus that's established itself in the human population.

It efficiently spreads. It's not something that can be eliminated. So we will have COVID cases. And it is going to become tamer, more like other respiratory viruses, because of the impact of the vaccine. Adulja told NPR that it's important to remember that even when vaccinated people test positive in these breakthrough cases, the risk of severe symptoms and hospitalization does decrease dramatically. The overarching goal, and I think many people forget this, was not to eradicate COVID-19. That's not possible. But to defang it. I do think we're well on the way to defanging and taming this virus.

As more people get vaccinated and more people get natural immunity, we are going to see this turn itself into a seasonal coronavirus that we deal with year in and year out, but aren't threatened in the way we have been in the past. All right, so let's get to the question on a lot of people's minds right now. Should I go back to masking up? For me, the main issue was that the new advice to mask up indoors was tied to where you live, whether you live in a place with quote unquote substantial or high coronavirus transmission. That's Dr. Ranit Mishori from Georgetown University again. Remember, she made the point that scrolling through your phone each morning to see the case rates in your county just doesn't sound like the most appealing homework. How often do you check it? It is such a confusing message.

And given that the Delta variant is now the dominant variant in the country, I think a clearer and perhaps more helpful message should have been something more uniform and universal. I spoke with Mishori about these new guidelines and about what best practices look like as people are trying to stay safe, but ideally not lose all of their newfound freedom. I mean, practically speaking, how difficult is it to do this kind of messaging clearly and effectively? Like, should we cut them some slack here? I am a very, very big CDC fan, and I think they are the number one public health agency in the country, if not in the world. But I take it back to, I think the original sin, as I would call it, was back in May with the reversal of the mask mandate. And I think at the time, the message was that if you're vaccinated, you get

to take off your mask and you'd be safe. And perhaps they thought that it would get more people to get vaccinated, but that's not how the public read the message. And a lot of people took it to mean that the pandemic was over. It wasn't over then, and it really isn't over now. But I think once you remove a restriction, it's really much more difficult to reinstate it. And we all know that masking is a highly political charge affair these days. Well, can we talk about how politics are an additional hurdle here, no matter what the science is? I mean, there are a lot of people out there who think that masking requirements are a violation of individual autonomy, a lot of people who don't believe the data around vaccines.

How do doctors and scientists overcome that counter-narrative? We pull our hair. We take a deep breath. Every day we talk to people who don't believe in the science. And it's hard, and it takes a lot of patience. But it takes more than the patience and the education on a one-on-one basis with doctor to patient or nurse to patient. This kind of misinformation and disinformation requires a national intervention. And changing policies, changing recommendations frequently is definitely not helping the cause of sending uniform and consistent messages that the public

can't believe in. Well, I'm also wondering, Dr. Mishori, if you think that all this confusion regarding these new mask guidelines, if that's actually distracting from the more important message here, and that is people should just get vaccinated. A hundred percent. Overall, you know, we focus perhaps too much on masking and masks are effective in preventing transmission. But I think ultimately vaccination is our best path

to ending the pandemic. And the CDC and the administration and all of us in the healthcare system, we need to come up with renewed efforts to get as many people vaccinated as possible in the US andS. and in other countries, because without more vaccination, this pandemic is not going away, mask on or off. That's Dr. Ranit Mishori.

So we just heard that masking isn't a good long-term solution for the pandemic, and that what it really comes down to is that more people just need to get vaccinated. We've had dozens and dozens and dozens of people who have responded and written in and said, I went and got the vaccine today or yesterday because of this. This is Mark Valentine speaking to Here and Now on behalf of his brother, Phil, who's currently hospitalized with COVID-19. He said, you know, I made the decision based on my situation, but I know now that a lot of people didn't get the vaccine because I didn't get the vaccine.

And that is what I would like to correct. Phil is a conservative radio talk show host based in Nashville, and he's been a prominent critic of COVID precautions and the vaccines. Take politics out of it. It's time for us to get together and fight this thing collectively and just put all the conspiracies and microchips and all that business aside and go get vaccinated. And don't put your family through what his wife and the rest of us are going through. The people not taking the vaccine report that they're not very worried about COVID. Dr. Robert Blenden is a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University. Anybody that's been involved in vaccine campaigns knows that the step is first,

people get worried. Just think about polio. When I was a child, my parents just in their heads saw these pictures of kids in iron lungs and children who have disability for the rest of their life. Blunden did a poll in the spring with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which we should note is an NPR funder, and the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health. And it found that there's a growing distrust towards agencies like the CDC and National Institutes of Health. So he says there needs to be a different approach in order to boost vaccination rates. He spoke with NPR's Kelsey Snell.

We've seen in the last few weeks an increase in vaccination. So there is some movement. But I need to make a point of something that happened here. North Miami, a collapse of a building where 98 people died. Their pictures were all over the paper how terrible it was. The president came down and made a family. The governor did. We have thousands of people dying every month. Their pictures aren't anywhere. It's human stories that move them, and they're not human stories. I don't know that Susan just died that I knew. I don't know about her story. I don't know how grieving her family is. So it's a question of personal connection with the stories that are being told and the numbers that people are seeing.

Yes. and the numbers that people are seeing. Yes, critical care physicians and nurses went on social media and said, I'm dealing with people near death, and they're begging for a vaccine, and they're saying they're sorry they didn't take it. Well, that's a story that really could impact how people were saying, I'm not going to take this vaccine, think, because it's people like them, and they realize that they could be worried if they were

going to be in that ICU. That's who people would trust and it would have to be local. And that's why the decision of the 60 medical organizations to recommend health organizations requiring their employees to absolutely take the vaccine has a chance of having a big secondary effect. And these are all organizations that have local in-community hospitals, clinics, medical groups. And as they try to move their own employees forward, they are going to have an educational effect and they're not going to be seen as anything to do with Washington. So you believe that those changes will drive regular everyday people who might not have the vaccine to go and then get the shot? Yes. And they'll hear about it locally.

And it'll be their voices, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, saying, you just can't come to our hospital. You're endangering people's lives. And it will be a local voice of clinicians, and they're likely to have people dealing with the critically ill. And I emphasize this all the time. You want to talk about those who get critically ill. It's like, again, when I was a child, most people with polio did not end up in an iron lung. But for parents, that picture, it could be your child, had a staggering impact on them. But we're now pushing a vaccine

on people who aren't sure they're at risk of dying here. And that's where the message has to change. And it has to come from people who you trust for medical advice, which means if I live in Nashville, it's going to be a physician, a nurse at institutions I go to that

tell me this. That's Dr. Robert Blenden, Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at Harvard University. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.