Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 428: Is It Possible You Are Irrational About COVID? | David Leonhardt

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

As we enter year three of the pandemic, the psychology of COVID is no less complex or consequential. This episode features one of the most prominent chroniclers of the pandemic, David Leonhardt from the New York Times, who argues that there is irrationality on all sides when it comes to the pandemic. He would also urge you to consider whether you might be over or underestimating the risks of COVID, based on where you stand politically. This episode also explores: the state of play in the pandemic right now and where we may be headed next; why and how attitudes about the pandemic, at least here in the US, have sorted along partisan lines; whether it makes sense to be angry with the unvaccinated; how a rise in vehicle crashes might speak to how COVID accelerated the fraying of America's social fabric; and David’s argument for why history and human decency can be a source of optimism going forward. David will also respond to his vehement critics who argue that his emphasis on lifting COVID restrictions and returning to some semblance of normalcy callously disregards the needs of the immunocompromised and unvaccinated. David Leonhardt is a senior writer for The New York Times. He writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter, and also writes for the Sunday Review section. He has worked at The Times since 1999 and has previously been an Op-Ed columnist, Washington bureau chief, co-host of “The Argument” podcast, founding editor of The Upshot section and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. In 2011, he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/david-leonhardt-426See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang, I have this clear memory of December 2019 back when I was still a news anchor. And we started doing stories on ABC about this new virus that was popping up over in China. At first, I paid almost zero attention to the story. We had covered viruses such as SARS and MERS in previous years when they popped up on the other side of the planet and neither of those outbreaks severely impacted America.

However, even when this new coronavirus started wreaking havoc in Europe and seemed to be heading our way, I was for no good reason, pretty sanguine. Even when the Dalai Lama, with whom I had an interview set for early March 2020 over in India, postponed our meeting, I figured it was just an overabundance of caution. Even when my wife, a pulmonologist, started stocking up on supplies, I still didn't want to believe that we had a genuine problem. It wasn't until early March 2020, with the virus truly at our doors that I started to wake up to the gravity of the situation, along with the rest of the country.

As you may remember, the NBA suspended its season. Tom Hanks announced he and his wife had the virus. The president addressed the nation. Millions of us were sent home from work. Two years have now passed since those fateful horrifying events. And my initial denial stands as just one small example of how this pandemic has brought out so many thorny aspects of human psychology.

As we enter year three of the pandemic, at least here in the States, it's been going on longer elsewhere, of course. But as we enter year three, the psychology of COVID is no less complex or consequential. So today I'm going to talk to one of the most prominent chroniclers of the pandemic, David Leighenhart from the New York Times, who argues that there is irrationality on all sides when it comes to the pandemic, and who would urge you to consider whether you too might be over or under estimating the risks based on where you stand politically. We're also going to talk about the state of play in the pandemic right now and where

we may be headed next. How and why attitudes about the pandemic, at least here in the US, have sorted along partisan lines, whether it makes sense to be angry with the unvaccinated, how a rise in vehicle crashes might speak to how COVID is accelerating the fraying of America's social fabric. And David's argument for why history and human decency can be a source of optimism going forward. David will also respond to his vehement critics who argue that his emphasis on lifting COVID restrictions and returning to some semblance of normalcy callously disregards the needs of the immunocompromised and unvaccinated.

A little bit more about David before we dive in. He's a senior writer at the New York Times. He writes the morning, which is the Times flagship daily newsletter. He also writes for the Sunday review section. He has worked for the time since 1999. He's previously been an op-ed columnist, Washington Bureau Chief, co-host of the argument podcast, founding editor of the upshot section, and a staff writer for the New York Times magazine.

And in 2011, he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Oh, and I should say this is actually the first in a two-part series on COVID that we're doing this week. Coming up on Friday, we're gonna talk to Lama Rod Owens, the great meditation teacher and author, who we often bring on at crucial moments, and he's gonna drop some knowledge about how to work with your mind at a moment of COVID fatigue, anxiety, and anger.

We'll get started with David Lee and Hart right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you wanna do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show.

Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer

on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. What's up? David Leighenhart, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. So, happy third year of COVID to you. And I guess my question is, as we enter this third year, how would you describe at the highest level the state of play?

It's actually an unusually clear moment, but there is still significant uncertainty. So let's start with the clear part. We have just come out of this Omicron wave in which we had a variant that was quite clearly more contagious, was much easier for people to give it to each other, including vaccinated people,

but it was also somewhat milder. It was not radically milder, but it was clearly milder. And so what we had during this wave was a huge number of cases, and we had a lot of severe illness, a lot of hospitalization and death. What makes that hospitalization and death hard to think about is that it was just heavily disproportionately among people who were not vaccinated. So if you just looked at the hospitalization and death numbers, you could sort of fool

yourselves into thinking that Omicron was much riskier for a vaccinated person than it really was. So that's what we are coming out of. And I want to be clear that the human toll of Omicron was really quite terrible. We're talking about levels of death that approached the peaks at any point during the pandemic. So now we've had Omicron cases receding for several weeks and just as has been the case in the past, hospitalizations follow cases by about a week deaths follow cases by about three weeks and so not only have cases really plunged But there's every reason to expect the deaths will continue to plunge for the next few weeks and there is nothing As a new development on the horizon that is worrisome. There's no variant that we see coming.

And so the baseline is that cases may not plummet all the way down towards zero, but cases are gonna get quite low for a variety of reasons we can talk about, basically vaccination boosters and natural immunity. And we're gonna be in a place that could look like, if you can remember it, kind of the early summer of 2021, where it really felt like

for the first time the pandemic was receiving. The problem is, there's a very good chance that we're going to get a new variant, and then we're going to end up in some new cycle that's going to introduce uncertainty. But that's where we are right now. First of all, thank you for the summary. I really appreciate that. Just follow up on it. It never goes away entirely, I guess.

It's not like we ever magically arrive in 2019. I think that's right. I think it never goes away entirely. And is there a scenario in which if we vaccinate enough people, it goes away entirely and we get to your herd immunity? There's that hypothetical scenario. I think some observers have exaggerated how likely that was. I think sometimes you've heard people basically blaming vaccine skepticism and lack of vaccine

equity around the world for not getting us to herd immunity. But just realistically, it's not like we were going to snap our fingers and have billions of vaccine doses overnight. And vaccine skepticism is a real thing. It's a real thing in the United States. It's a real thing in much of the world. You also weren't going to be vaccinating kids for a long time. And so I think we didn't do this that well, but I actually am not sure how easy it ever

would have been to get to herd immunity. And that's not great. It would be really nice if we could snap our fingers and make COVID-19 disappear forever. But we live with a lot of circulating respiratory illnesses. We live with circulating coronaviruses. We live with the flu. And so there definitely is a way to return to something that looks like normalcy, even with COVID still here,

or to take the framing of your question, we can get back to a world that looks a lot like 2019, if we choose to, even with COVID continuing to circulate. So many more questions to ask based on that. Let me start with, what do you mean if we choose to and aren't there real risk associated with that given that COVID is if I understand it deadlier than the flu? Well, COVID is not deadlier for the flu for everybody. It appears to be milder than the flu for children. Now I don't want to get caught up in really close comparisons of is it a little bit milder than the flu for children. Now, I don't want to get caught up in really close

comparisons of, is it a little bit milder or is it a little bit more severe? Because we're going to need a lot more data over many years to get that sense. But it's certainly in the same ballpark as the flu. And it's in the same ballpark as the flu for vaccinated people, for most vaccinated people. And I want to emphasize something, that includes vulnerable people. So the issue isn't so much that COVID is much more severe for a vaccinated elderly person, or a vaccinated immunocompromised person. COVID is probably somewhat more severe for some of those groups, but it's in the same ballpark. The issue is that COVID is another disease like the flu,

and that elderly people have vulnerable bodies, and vulnerable health systems systems and immune systems. And so I think this is really hard to think through the different layers of risk. I think there are two things going on here. It's unavoidably complicated from a medical perspective. And then there's also the psychological fact that COVID has dominated our lives for now. What, two years, right? You started by saying, happy third year of COVID. It's dominated our lives in a way that nothing in our lifetimes has. I mean, I really think it's like nothing in terms of dominating daily life since World War II. I'm not saying it's

better or worse than World War II. I'm saying in terms of dominating daily life, I mean, I'm a New Yorker. I'm a third generation New Yorker. I lived in New York on September 11th, 2001 and it was horrible, but within just a few weeks the vast majority of New Yorkers were back to something that looked like normal life for them, right? Obviously there were 3,000 people kill and there was a lot of mourning, but it's a city of 8 million people and for most people in the city their job Three weeks after 9 11 was virtually identical to their job before 9 11. COVID isn't like that. I mean, I'm I'm in my attic You appear to be in something that isn't an office, right? COVID has

really dominated daily life and so I completely understand why we have a hard time being rational about weighing the COVID risks. And then you put on top of that the fact that there are these sort of three levels of risk to think about. There's the risk to an unvaccinated person, which is of an order that's kind of like nothing else. If you're not vaccinated, particularly if you're over 40 years old or over 60 years old, COVID presents a risk to you like nothing else. If you are vaccinated or are a child, the risks that COVID presents to you look actually quite normal.

A kid almost certainly will face more risk by getting in a car today than a kid will face from COVID. And then the third level is, well, but what about vaccinated people who are vulnerable, elderly people or immunocompromised people? COVID is more threatening to them and that calls for responses to it that take it seriously. But it's not necessarily of a different order of threat to them than the flu.

The flu also kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, overwhelmingly Americans who are in vulnerable health. And, you know, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, said that 75% of vaccinated deaths came among people who had at least four risk factors. And so, I think the way we should be thinking about COVID is our efforts should be very much focused on protecting a relatively small percentage of people, essentially highly vulnerable people

and people who have chosen not to get vaccinated. COVID doesn't actually present some huge new risk to the vast majority of people who choose to get vaccinated. And that's what makes it so hard to think about. Yeah, so just to see if I can state some of this back here, I don't have many, or if any of the risk factors, I'm triple-vaxed so as my wife, my kid. So on some level, I can return to quote unquote, normal, but what makes it, and in fact, as soon as we're done recording this, I'm going to go to a restaurant with

some friends inside. Yes. But what makes this hard to think about is I have parents who are approaching 80 and living in a assisted living facility. I know people who are refused to give vaccinated. So how do I deal with them? That has many levels, interpersonally, and in terms of their health risks and mine. The math is not simple. No, nor is the ethics of it. I would really put those two groups

of people into different categories. I think that people who have done all they can to protect themselves from COVID, which means at this point, not only being fully vaccinated, it's a bad phrase, fully vaccinated. It means not only having had a full initial dose of the vaccine, but also having been boosted.

I think people who are in that category, who are in their 80s, who are immunocompromised. And I think if you're talking about immunocompromised people, who are people who deserve a lot of attention now, I think it's important, there are sometimes broad categories of immunocompromised people, not everybody who's immunocompromised is vulnerable to COVID specifically.

You know, you sometimes see estimates that 5% of Americans are immunocompromised. It's not that many people who are specifically vulnerable to COVID. So I think what we really want to do is focus on people who are specifically vulnerable. And so at first when I was looking at the numbers, I was really alarmed about what Omicron would mean for elderly vaccinated people. And the data is a little easier to look at for the elderly than immunocompromised because the definitions are a little clearer, but the patterns are probably the same. The more I looked at it, the more I thought that even for elderly people, this looks like something on the order of the

flu when you look at the numbers for a boosted elderly person. This looks like something on the order of the flu. So I mean, I guess what I would say is given how easy it now is to take rapid tests, right? If you're going particularly in an assisted living facility, if you're going to visit someone in an assisted living facility, if you're going to be with someone who's in their 80s or 90s, and you have access to tests, take tests before you see them. I think for those people, it's harder

because they have to decide whether they're comfortable going to restaurants, and I think any number of decisions is reasonable. Look, I think with the unvaccinated, I have a really hard time telling vaccinated people that they need to organize their lives to protect the health of the unvaccinated. And the reason I say that is the unvaccinated aren't trying to protect you if you're vaccinated.

You just mentioned your parents who are in their 80s. You know who's not doing things that protect your parents, the unvaccinated. And so I have a really hard time saying, you know those unvaccinated people are making decisions, they're their personal decisions, but they're doing things that threaten the health of your parents. And yet you should turn around and do a lot of things to protect them. I have a hard time going there, you know? If they're not doing things to protect you, I have a hard time saying that you shouldn't go interact with your kids' schools in order to protect unvaccinated adults. If you want to do it,

that's fine, but I have a hard time urging you to do that. Well, let's stay with the unvaccinated for a second. And let me loop back to something you said earlier a couple of answers ago I heard it as Maybe those of us who are vaccinated shouldn't have been as angry as many of us were at the unvaccinated during the Obochron Surge because there really wasn't a situation in which the whole world got vaccinated quick enough to have Blunted that in a meaningful fashion. Did I hear that correctly? I think you heard the second half of it correctly.

But maybe not the first half. I think it's fair to be frustrated with the unvaccinated. For precisely the reason I just said, which is unvaccinated people are putting your parents at risk. They really are. I get that they're making a decision that they think is best for them,

but they're putting almost no way on the health and well-being of vulnerable Americans. And so I do think that there's been a little bit of exaggeration of, oh, if only all Americans who were eligible to get vaccinated, gotten vaccinated, we would have gotten to herd immunity. I think that's pretty unlikely. When you take into account the fact that kids were not going to be vaccinated for a long time, when you take into account that even if we had more equitable vaccine distribution around the world, we didn't immediately have billions of vaccines, right? And so the vaccine rollout was always going to be slow. I think it's important to take vaccine skepticism seriously in terms of realizing how widespread it is. I mean, it isn't

just Republicans in the United States. It's disproportionately Republicans in the United States. But if you look around the world, there's a lot of vaccine skepticism in France. There is an enormous amount of vaccine skepticism in some African countries. There's also a lack of vaccine access in Africa, but it really varies by country and Africa. There have been countries in Africa, like South Africa,

that have not been able to use all the vaccine doses that they got because of the level of vaccine skepticism. And so there's a lot of vaccine skepticism around the world. And when you add kids in, I just think it's relatively unlikely that we were going to get to herd immunity. Now, who knows we're sort of talking about a hypothetical. I still think it's fair to be frustrated with unvaccinated people because even if we weren't going to get to herd immunity, even if we weren't going to make this whole thing go away, unvaccinated person is much more likely to get COVID and to pass it along and potentially to pass it along to a vulnerable person in this country. And they're also particularly likely to pass it on to another unvaccinated person and cause terrible damage to that person. So I think it's okay to be frustrated

at unvaccinated people, even if we shouldn't say, if only more Americans got vaccinated, this would all be over now. You talked about the likelihood of passing COVID along, but something I've heard from vaccine skeptics is, well, what we've just seen during Omicron is that you can pass it along if you're vaccinated. Why should I get vaccinated? Yeah. Well, I mean, do you know that most drunk people who get behind the wheel don't get in an accident?

I would still encourage you not to have three martinis and then get behind the wheel. And similarly, someone who is not vaccinated is more likely, substantially, more likely to get COVID and pass it on than someone who is vaccinated. It's like driving drunk. What is your personal philosophy about having these dialogues across this yawning chasm of vaccine enthusiasm or let's just say compliance versus vaccine skepticism. I think it's really hard. You and I haven't gotten into this yet. We should at some point even briefly.

There are real costs to the pandemic restrictions that we've put in place. There are real costs to isolation. There are real costs. They're not huge for most people, but there are costs to wearing masks. That's why we didn't do it before. It makes life a lot harder for people who are hard of hearing. It makes life harder for kids who are learning to say, a lot of people just don't like it, you know, fox their glasses. So there are real costs to these things. And by many, many measures, American society isn't functioning well right now.

Violent crime surged. And it has surging and it started surging right when the pandemic happened. Vehicle crashes, same thing, drug overdoses, same thing, mental health problems, same thing. Learning loss is, you know, is a huge problem. And almost all these things are a bigger problem for lower income Americans and many of them are bigger problem for Americans of color. And so pandemic restrictions have costs. And as you might imagine, pointing out those costs is something

that political conservatives often like to emphasize. I don't completely understand why America has sorted on this thing by politics because not all European countries have. Being in favor of sort of opening up in Europe doesn't align perfectly with politics. Lots of leftists in Europe are kind of less in favor of pandemic restrictions than Democrats in America, but it has in America.

And so when I've pointed out these costs of the pandemic, conservatives have sometimes echoed that argument in it or invited me on their podcasts, and I tend to say yes unless they're promoting disinformation. When I go on, what I try to do is I try to say, hey, if you like it when I point out that isolation has costs, that even mass-quaring has costs, mass-quaring also has benefits, by the way, makes you less likely to pass on the virus. If you like it when I point out the costs, please listen to me about this as well. The vaccines work. They are miracles of science.

They work enormously well. And so I'm a writer at The New York Times. I'm obviously not someone who has inherent credibility with vaccine skeptical right-wingers in America. But I basically try to say, if you listen to one message, try to listen to the other. I think the much more persuasive messengers

about the vaccine are gonna be people who themselves used to be skeptical and then weren't. It's going to be people who have lost a relative from COVID and want to talk about it. It's going to be Donald Trump. I mean, look when Donald Trump said, hey, go get the vaccine. He was sort of slowed, emphasized that, and he hasn't followed it up that much. He's instead followed it up by kind of continuing to spout falsehoods about other things. But it's really beneficial to have Donald Trump talking about the value of the vaccines because a lot of the people in the United States who haven't taken the vaccines are big supporters of Donald Trump.

Didn't you get booed at one point first? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes it all the more valuable, right? So, do you have anybody in your personal orbit you've had to have hard conversations with about vaccines or is everybody you know on board. That's a good question.

I have not had to have any hard conversations with friends or family members about the vaccine. I have had kind of tense exchanges with people about the vaccine, but they're readers, right? They're people who are interacting with me as a journalist in my professional role, not in my personal role. I mean, I sat in front of someone in an airplane recently who was complaining loudly

about the vaccines. It seemed pretty clear he wasn't vaccinated, which obviously didn't love to be sitting in front of him on the airplane, but what are you gonna do? I'm vaccinated and I think the vaccines are extremely strong. And so while I'd rather not be surrounded by unvaccinated people, I also feel very well protected. Did you engage with this person on the plane?

No, no, I read my book. It's not like you're out there engaging with every single person all the time. When somebody hands you a megaphone like the New York Times or a podcast, you're gonna make your case, but it doesn't seem like you're advising that we should be engaged in hand-to-hand rhetorical combat

over this all the time. Well, certainly not. We shouldn't be engaged in hand-to-hand rhetorical combat all the time. time. Well, certainly not. We shouldn't be engaged in hand to hand rhetorical combat all the time. I grew up in this wonderfully loving extended family with extremely different political views. And one of the ways that it got along was basically politics was something that was rarely talked about or at least not in some settings was a talked about a talk about an immediate families, but not really extended family gatherings. So I'm all in favor of things like that.

Sometimes I'm always wondering, when people say how to talk politics of Thanksgiving, my attitude is a little bit like, don't talk politics of Thanksgiving. There are a lot of great subjects to talk about a Thanksgiving that aren't politics. But having said that, I do think if people have people in their lives who are not vaccinated and they're sort of willing to swallow hard and say, hey, can I engage with you about this? Can I get you to talk about your doctor? I think that's worth it, particularly if the person is

probably in the 40s and 50s, certainly in their 60s, 70s, 80s. You mean you might be saving their life, so I think it's worth it. Much more of my conversation with David Lee and Hart after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown all are, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you'd like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Staying with vaccines,

you mentioned that in America, we've sorted along political or partisan or tribal lines on vaccines and also on lots of other stuff related to the pandemic. You did some polling and wrote about what you've called the two COVID-Americans. Can you hold forth on that, please? Sure. And let me just say at the outset, I find it really confusing. Like I'm going to describe how we got here, step by step, and I kind of get each step.

But when you turn around and look at where we've ended up, it's really bizarre. Like there is no real reason necessarily that all this stuff should align perfectly with politics. So the very brief history of it is COVID starts and we have a very polarizing Republican president who says a series of things about COVID that are patently false. He says it's no big deal. I think one of the reasons why people are uncomfortable with comparisons of COVID to the flu, which is actually an excellent and relevant comparison for a boosted person, is that Donald Trump started comparing COVID to the flu

before there were vaccines when it was a ludicrous comparison. And if you kind of just go back and look at the things that Trump said about the pandemic, they were just proved spectacularly wrong. He said, it's gonna go away one day like a miracle. And so in response to him, not just him, but in response to him. And I also think it played into a bunch of ideological instincts that people have, conservatives like freedom, rather than the government encouraging you or telling you to do something. I think liberals in the United States are often very concerned about the notion of personal safety.

I think it's one of the reasons why playgrounds and childhood, particularly in more liberal parts of the country are sort of built to be even safer than playgrounds in Europe, which is interesting. You often hear the notion safety in terms of speech from the left. So it played into a whole bunch of things. And essentially what happened was people on the right viewed minimizing COVID as part of their political identity.

People on the left viewed taking COVID seriously as part of their political identity. I want to be clear that I am not equating those two attitudes in the first year of COVID, particularly the attitude of the political left was just much more responsible and much more in keeping with public health. That continued to be the case when the vaccines come, and Democrats were much more eager to go get the vaccine. Obviously, it's a big country, tensens of millions of Republicans have been vaccinated. At first, among African Americans and Latinos who are predominantly Democrat, there was more vaccine skepticism. But even that, trunk over time, and now, basically, the huge remaining

vaccine gap is the partisan gap. Something like 90 plus percent, it's probably 93 percent of eligible Democrats are vaccinated. A huge share of Republicans are not vaccinated. When we looked at this a month ago or so, there were more unvaccinated Republicans than boosted Republicans. Now, maybe that's flipped, but that's just a remarkable thing. But then something funny happened, which is this switched from Democrats just being fully on the side of science and that attitude. It flipped and Democrats, even with the vaccines, were so afraid of COVID that it became a kind of weird form of liberal vaccine skepticism. Liberals got the vaccine eagerly, but they then sort of said,

well, even though I have the vaccine, it kind of doesn't matter. And what we found in this poll is that Democrats are so much more worried about their own personal risk of COVID. When you ask about your personal risk or in other polls, it's not just our poll, it's found this. When you ask, what do you think your chances are being hospitalized, not only are Democrats much, much more anxious than Republicans, but younger vaccinated Democrats are more anxious

than older, unvaccinated Republicans, which is remarkable. I actually think this might be the most telling thing. Younger Democrats say they are more worried about their own risk of being hospitalized than older Democrats. So what could explain that? That's certainly not a view consistent with science. I think the thing that could explain it, and I've heard all the competing theories we can talk about them if you want.

I don't think they hold up. I think the only thing to can let get explained is that younger Democrats are also substantially more liberal than older Democrats. And basically personal fear about COVID risk correlates, not perfectly, but pretty strongly with where you are on the political spectrum. The furt of the left you are, the more worried you are, even if you're vaccinated, the further to the right you are, the less worried you are, even if you're not vaccinated. And it's sort of depressing because to me, it suggests ways in which partisanship rather than science is dictating how we think about this. If I had to sum up in two words, everything you just said, it would be irrationality

abounds. Yes. And I just want to pause here and say the form of irrationality from Republicans has been more damaging than the form of irrationality from Democrats. But I do think a lot of Democrats are being irrational about this. And I think their irrationality also causes damage, even if it is not as large as vaccine skepticism. And the reason it causes damage even if it is not as large as vaccine skepticism. And the reason it causes damage, I think many Democrats are exaggerating the risks of COVID to themselves, to their families, to their friends, and are understating the costs

of isolation and disruption. I think many Democrats are understating the damage we are doing to kids by keeping them home from school, including during the Omicron Wave. I think they are understating the damage we're doing to mental health by having people isolated or in masks all the time. And we have to get this balance right. There are no easy answers. There are real trade-offs here.

But I think what has often happened is a significant number of Americans who skew politically liberal have tried to solve for COVID rather than solving for total public health. And when you solve for COVID, you do things like you keep kids home from school, even though COVID presents extremely little risk to kids. A kid who has COVID and is contagious should be kept home from school. A kid who's been exposed to it or a kid who is contagious a week ago, but no longer seems to be, I think it's really hard to argue that we should be keeping those kids homes from school. And yet, that's what we're doing.

And it's doing real damage to kids. As you know, you have some critics. Let me just give you a chance to, specifically on this issue, you've got some critics. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And let me just give you a chance to respond. Another writer who I also respect Ed Young, he didn't name you,

but seemed to be talking about you in a recent article, a profile of you in New York magazine. And he said, I'm quoting here, we're still getting a daily mass death event. Our hospitals were overwhelmed and broken. And yet the narrative, I think, from many corners of the media has been one of optimism of thinking about a return to normal. I feel that a lot of influential people in this pandemic basically got vaccinated and then just kind of lost the plot. I also have a lot of respect for Ed Young. I think the problem with this argument that talking about a return to normal is just sunny optimism is that it completely ignores the huge costs for isolation and disruption.

So my attitude is not that we need to grapple with the balance of returning to normal because we need to be sunny and happy or because it's nice to go out to dinner. My argument is that the disruption and isolation of the pandemic has wrought huge costs on our society and those costs have fallen disproportionately, not on New York Times reporters or on magazine writers, or on tenured epidemiologists and biologists. We're mostly doing just fine. When our kids get kept home from school

because of COVID, we still get paid. We can do our jobs. As a journalist, I can do my job for my attic. And I don't have to wear a mask all day. People who are in jobs where if they miss a day of work, because their kids are home, and because they're hourly workers, or as one person, we just quoted in the Times, because they're hairstyles, and they just get paid when they have clients. When their kids are kept home from school, they lose their paycheck. These are people who often do, unlike me, have to wear a mask. They're a whole day at work, eight, 10 hours. And I think that a lot of this debate has ignored those costs.

And so just to repeat them, mental health problems have surged, attempted suicides according to the latest CDC report have particularly surged among adolescent girls. Drug overdoses have absolutely gone through the roof and the timing lines up with the pandemic. Who overdoses from drugs in this country? Mostly people who don't have a four-year college degree, working class people.

Violent crime is sword. Who are the disproportionately the victims of violent crime, lower-income people, people of color? Vehicle crashes have sword. Again, the timing lines up almost perfectly with the pandemic. You wouldn't necessarily think it, but who are the victims of vehicle crashes?

Disproportionately lower- income people and black and Latino Americans. Learning loss in school has gone way up, which is to say learning has gone down. Where is it going down the most? It appears to have gone down the most probably among boys, but certainly among lower income kids and kids who are black and Latino.

And so the costs of this isolation and disruption have been large, they have fallen mostly on vulnerable Americans. And what I have sort of yet to see is someone grapple with those costs and say yes, even in spite of those costs, we should be closing schools. And we didn't close schools entirely during Omekron,

but huge numbers of kids, I mean tens of millions of kids missed multiple days. A recent poll found that one in four kids had missed at least a week of school in January. At least a week in one month. And so this isn't a kind of question of like, let's go party. It's a question of,

COVID has had horrible costs. Isolation and disruption have had a horrible costs. We can't simply wave away the second of those horrible costs, which I think too often the political left has done. We can't just wave away those costs and say, hey, let's be carrying human beings and let's focus on COVID. Because if that's all we focus on, we're going to hurt a lot of people and we're going to hurt a lot of working class people. And so what I would urge people who said we can't get back to normal.

What I would urge them to do is focus on the whole picture. Don't just focus on professionals. Think about this as the entire country and think about what is it that would actually maximize public health. That doesn't just mean let it rip. That doesn't just mean let's have all kids go to school. It doesn't just mean everyone take their masks off. It doesn't mean have everything go back to normally. It really doesn't. But it also doesn't mean that the way to be compassionate is to focus

only on COVID. And I think that's the mistake that some people have made. So how do we balance this? How do we make public health decisions from the broadest perspective of, let's be very mindful of the costs to the most vulnerable people in our society from these COVID restrictions? At the same time, let's also protect the people who are vulnerable to the disease.

You know, one of your critics has said that the idea that 2,000 people died today, it's acceptable because they were old, they were sick, or they were unvaccinated, and that's eugenic and genocidal. Yes. I don't hear you saying that for the record. But these are two defensible values, and so how do we walk between them? Yeah, setting aside the sort of kind of ludicrous adjectives thrown around there, which I know

you weren't adopting. I do think this is a really healthy debate to be having, right? It matters. We live in a democracy. We should be having passionate debates. That's the way it should work. I mean, we should try to avoid making it personal. Too much of a political discourse in this country has kind of become personal. But the notion that we have to have passionate debates about this are really important. I think, again, we can't just say you have to care about vulnerable people, or we could just say you have to care about vulnerable people, but you have to look at it in a holistic way. So do we need to care about the elderly? Absolutely.

Do we need to care about the immunocompromised? Absolutely. I have some specific thoughts about things we're not doing to protect the elderly and immunocompromise. Do we need to care about the unvaccinated? Absolutely. But the debate can't end there. Do we need to care about lower income kids, about black kids, about Latino kids, about white kids and Asian kids, even if the white and Asian kids aren't falling behind in school as much as the black and Latino kids, we do. Do we need to care about the huge toll of opioids, mostly in working class communities, that has gotten much worse because of the isolation during the pandemic? Do we need to care about the increase in suicide attempts among adolescent girls?

Do we need to care about the increases in mental health? Do we need to care about the fact that blood pressure? Nationwide has gone up during the pandemic. We are social creatures. We are built to interact with each other. And when we don't, when people stay inside their houses, when they cover their faces, that has costs. And so I think it is a really hard issue about how to balance. But we can't get there if we pretend that isolation and disruption hasn't had costs. If we look at only one side of the ledger, we're going to make decisions that hurt people and that's what I worry we are sometimes doing. It still doesn't answer your question.

How do we do it? Because it's really, really hard and we can talk a little bit about maybe how you do it, sort of not my job to tell the country how to do it, but I think the only way to do it is to balance these different things. It really is. And I also think that we have to have an honest conversation about the role that the unvaccinated are playing in this because they are overwhelmingly the people who are suffering severe illness here. And we have to think about, I'm not saying this answers the question, but should we to protect the unvaccinated, be willing to damage children, and particularly lower income children? I don't know what the answer to that

question is. Obviously, it's a pointed question. I can tell you the way we've answered that question for much of the pandemic is we have said yes we are willing to hurt children to protect the unvaccinated. It's not obvious to me that that is the right decision. Much more of my conversation with David Leonhart after this. Do you have any thoughts on how to convince the unvaccinated or is that just never going to happen? No, I think it can happen. I think we've seen people doing really good work about that. I think a lot of it's about getting vaccines super convenient, recognizing that the biggest predictor vaccination is partisanship.

It's not income, but vaccination rates are lower for working class people than they are for professionals. And so some of the same things I said before about missing work applied to vaccines, you know, many people have gotten vaccinated, including me, feel pretty crummy for a day afterwards. So I can just get in bed when I feel crummy, but someone who has an hourly job can't necessarily. So I think it's important to put pressure on employers to give people time off. I think it is important to make vaccine so convenient that maybe someone says, you know what? Saturday morning I'm gonna go and it's a long weekend. Maybe they were on the fence and they go on a Saturday morning and they think, I may feel crummy Sunday and Monday but I don't have to be back at work till Tuesday. You know, maybe they work a shift where they're off Tuesday and Wednesday and they decide to go Tuesday morning. I think it's having nurses and doctors available

to answer people's questions. I think many people are not hard-know on the vaccine. Many people are hard-know, but many others are still somewhere in the willing to consider it. And when you listen to people who've actually gone done this work, I really don't think we should give up on trying to persuade people to get vaccines.

I think the value of it is so huge. I think it's heartbreaking to hear people who didn't get vaccinated and then are very sick and regret it. And so I think we should absolutely keep trying. It's not simply a matter of if we give everyone access, they'll get vaccinated. I mean, any American who wants to go get vaccinated

can now go get vaccinated, but we should make it as easy as possible and we really should not give up. But obviously a big factor in some percentage, a large percentage of vaccine skepticism is this irrationality that we've been talking about. And as you've said, there's irrationality on both sides here of the political divide. I wonder if you have thoughts about how to address that.

How do we get people thinking more clearly about this and other issues? Because these tribal goggles that we tend to dawn on so many of the most important issues from climate to race on and on seem to, to my opinion, just incredibly damaging. And so, yeah, I'll stop talking and let you talk if you have anything to say about how we address this. It's really hard. It's really hard. I mean, I do think it's really important to try to keep public debate on a level where you sort of don't try to disqualify the people you disagree with. You know, and so I would encourage people, when you see someone you disagree with, don't necessarily accuse them of being a bad human being, right?

Don't accuse them of spreading falsehoods. There are people who spread falsehoods, as I've mentioned in this conversation, Donald Trump is one of them. There are also lots of people who are gonna disagree and both be dealing in something that looks like facts. And so I would encourage people, recognize that passionate disagreement can exist without the

person you're disagreeing with either being a liar or being evil. And I think often we see people forget that in this country. I think, you know, as I just told you, I just had some sort of tough, substantive words for people who I think are ignoring a lot of the cost of the pandemic. I think their motives are overwhelmingly good. Overwhelmingly good. They want to protect immunocompromised people. They want to protect elderly people. They want to protect unvaccinated people. Often they're showing incredible care for the unvaccinated. I have deep respect for that. The fact that I think they're sometimes ignoring some costs or adding up the ledger in a way that leads us to do things that are damaging,

doesn't make them bad people. And I just would sort of encourage everyone to try to keep that in mind, that whatever your issue is, it's just really important. I mean, I had Ross Dalfit as a conservative columnist at the time. He and I used to do a podcast together. And I was really, I am kind of alarmed at his lack of alarm on climate, but I don't recall Ross ever lying about climate change. I think Ross is an enormously decent human being and it's hard, right? Because sometimes I was really frustrated at him and I think he has a set of views on climate change that we're probably are going to be damaging to his children and mine.

But that's what political debates are often about. And so that's one thing. I think the second thing I would say is try to limit the number of debates, number of issues that you decide are existential threats to the future. If you've decided that climate change and COVID policy and the future of Medicare and abortion policy and charter schools and gun control. And I could list five more things. If you've decided that anyone who disagrees with you on those is essentially anti-American,

that's really hard. Like we have to have some issues that we could compromise on. We have to. Right? Like if you asked me, what are the issues that are above any other issues, I would say climate change in democracy. And I might put inequality in living standards, which are kind of one issue, just below that, because I think it affects our entire society.

I have some strong views about some other issues, but I just can't get them up in that pantheon, because we have to be able to disagree about a lot of these things. It's the way a democracy is going to work. Having said that, I am deeply, deeply, deeply humble that any of those things I just laid out will help, but I do think they're useful things for individuals to think about. Staying on things that might be useful for individuals to think about. In the foregoing you talked about, largely your emphasis was on how do we relate to people with whom we

disagree. I wonder if you have thoughts about how we relate to our own biases and our own potential for irrationality. That's a really humbling and scary thing to consider. What do you have to say about that? Yeah, I think that's also a really good individual exercise. So I would say a few things. One, a friend of mine introduced a game at a dinner party recently where, you know, be honest about whether you're basically on the left or right half of the spectrum.

And then you have to talk about what the view you have is that most runs counter to where you are in the spectrum. Right? So if you're a liberal, you got to describe what your most conservative view is. Right? So I think exercises like that are kind of interesting because it helps you a little bit put yourself

in the shoes of other people, right? It helps you think about when you disagree with people you normally agree with. Now that's hard in our super polarized society because increasingly some people don't even have those views, but I still think it's useful. I think it's useful to think about when have you changed your mind about something? A political issue in your life. When was there something that you used to have one view? And now you have another. What changed your mind? What do you think now about the people about something, a political issue in your life. When was there something that you used to have one view? And now you have another.

What changed your mind? What do you think now about the people who have the view that you used to have? And then finally, I think it's important. And this might be a little bit more for journalists and experts than it is for other people, but think about when you got something wrong. So I try to write one piece every year looking back over the things from the previous year and when you got something wrong. So I try to write one piece every

year looking back over the things from the previous year in which I got something wrong. And I don't mean spelling mistakes, which we correct immediately. I mean bits of analysis that don't look so good in retrospect. So I had three things in 2021. I underestimated how many breakthrough infections there would be among vaccinated people. There were very few percentage-wise before Delta, but then with Delta there were a lot. I underestimated how important boosters were. There was kind of a debate among experts about whether immunity was really waning, and I kind of quoted both sides as if they had equal claims on the evidence, and turns out

that the people who were worried about and waning immunity and strongly in favor of boosters, the more evidence came in, the better they looked. And I kind of presented it as a toss-up, which is how it was in my mind, but it wasn't a toss-up anymore. And after 30 years in which inflation really wasn't a problem in the US, if anything, the main problem was people worried too much about inflation, and screamed that we're about to have inflation win,

in fact, the bigger problem was that we didn't have strong economic growth or rage growth. Obviously, inflation became a big problem. So So you know, it's not particularly fun to look back and talk about these are some things I wrote and in retrospect I think I was wrong about them. But I think it's healthy and I would encourage other people to do versions of that and try to think about okay what were the mistakes or the things I did that led to that? And you will never be perfect. You'll still make mistakes, but maybe you'll at least not make the same ones repeatedly.

Not only is it healthy, but it's in your self-interest because you're likely to make fewer mistakes going forward, I believe, if you're examining the biases that forced you into errors in the past. Yeah, I agree. I do think in the world we're in, it's in your self-interest, but I also just want to say it's hard, because people, I promise you, will tell you, we'll remind you of the things you got

wrong, which is fine, but like, to people who are thinking about doing this, like if you start doing it and you think, this is a little uncomfortable, please, still, keep going, do it. It's going to be a little bit longer, careful. It's like, when I go and speak to college kids who are either in a journalism school or working for the school paper, one of the things I always tell them is if you want to be a writer, don't let the fact that you think you're not good at it stop you from being a writer. Because that is the exact attitude I had when I was a teenager, which is wow, I really like this. If I weren't so bad at it, I would do it. And you know what? You can get better at stuff. And in the case of writing, you might never actually feel good at it, but you can get better at it. And sort of similarly, I think this is one of these

things in which there's just huge value and struggle, but that doesn't make struggle necessarily enjoyable. And so just don't confuse the fact that there's value with the fact that while you're doing it, it might be unpleasant. Hey, man. Let me ask about another aspect of pandemic psychology. You have brought up a couple of times, vehicle crashes. Yes. I was particularly disturbed by a recent article in the New York Times about not just vehicle crashes, but pedestrian deaths by my colleague, Simoneero based in New Mexico. And the thesis Simone seemed to be advancing if I read the article correctly was that it was linked

to the degradation of social cohesion as a consequence of the pandemic. Yes. And I just would love to hear your thoughts about this that in some ways it seems like this pandemic, as we enter year three, has put us in a situation where we care less about one another. We are willing to be reckless in a way that really endangers other people. Yes, Simone quoted multiple experts in that piece,

and I found their words just really affecting. I mean, I said this to some colleagues of mine that I've spent a lot of time talking to experts about COVID, about the costs of the virus itself, about the costs of the sort of side effects that come from the isolation and disruption. But Simone's article had like three of the most eloquent lines I'd read anywhere about this broad issue. They were all about vehicle crashes and pedestrians, but the larger point really applies in other areas. It's not that, you know, we've been in stuck in our houses, and that's frustrating and no fun, and we get in the car, and we say, I don't care. I'm just

going to drive around. That's obviously not the way it works, right? It's that what they were basically saying is that people feel frustrated. They feel frustrated by the amount of illness and death that has been around. They feel frustrated by, and I'm now going beyond their quotes, that they feel frustrated by, you know, the fact that maybe their brother wasn't able to have a wedding and they couldn't see their whole family. Maybe their cousin missed her sweet 16-party and the family couldn't get together. Maybe people couldn't gather for a funeral. Maybe people couldn't be at the bedside of someone who was dying. And just in lots of little ways, we all know this. I mean, sometimes I get an email from a reader that is angry.

There's a certain level of anger I'm just not going to reply to. But then there's kind of like a middle ground where they're angry, but they're also kind of making a substantive point. And sometimes I'll reply and I'll say, hey, thanks for your note. I appreciate the critique. We don't have to do this angrily. We can do this. We can disagree not angri appreciate the critique. We don't have to do this, Angerly. We can do this.

We can disagree not, Angerly. And the reaction I get almost to a one is some version of, oh, I didn't mean to be angry, right? And I promise they were angry in the tone, right? It's like, oh, no, no. But what I think that's about is that they weren't thinking of me as a human being when they wrote that email, right? They were thinking of me as a byline.

They were thinking of me as the New York Times. They were thinking who knows? They were thinking of me as a byline, they were thinking of me as the New York Times, they were thinking of who knows, they were thinking of me as someone on the other end of an email. They were thinking of me as a human being. Once I became a human being, the fact they thought I was terribly wrong about something, they were able to say that without being hostile, right? And I think what's happened over the last two years is we've been deprived of a lot of that human interaction. We've been deprived of the things that let us say in a workplace, hey, you know what, I really disagree with you on this,

but you're a nice person. And we talked about the movie. We both saw this weekend when we bumped into each other at the coffee stand, or we laughed about the fact that the New York Jets lost again in horribly humiliating fashion. And we had a human interaction. And I think we've had so many less of those that it is just caused frustration and anti-social behavior

and aggressive behavior to just become much more common and acceptable. Obviously, social media sometimes foments that. But it's not just social media. And to try to land this answer at the same place where you had it take off. We see it with the way people drive their cars. They're just, they're more aggressive.

They say, Oh, I'm going to get through this light. They're less caring about others. And that has huge costs. And so I don't think as we start to remove COVID restrictions, I don't think there's some magic bullet that everything just goes back to, society's going to be healthy, but I would encourage us to remember that there are huge numbers of flashing red lights that are saying that we are suffering from isolation and disruption. It's vehicle crashes, it's violent crime, it's drug overdoses, it's the way kids are behaving in schools, it's Americans blood pressure, it's suicide attempts. It's one thing after another.

And we are built to be social creatures. And it's not especially shocking that when we have a two-year experiment in which we force an enormous amount of isolation and less human contact on people, that people respond by behaving really badly in all kinds of ways that don't necessarily obviously follow from, oh, people were stuck inside their houses, they weren't interacting with each other, they weren't smiling with each other, thus they were driving more aggressively. But that's what's happened. Yeah, and I guess this is sort of a bummer of sentiment to be voicing toward the end here.

But some of these flashing red lights, I think, will go to yellow, maybe green as we reduce the levels of isolation. But to me, the incivility, the polarization, tribalism, dehumanization, loneliness, anxiety, depression, those were all on the rise pre-pandemic. From my grasping of the data, which may be wrong, but I think it's right. And I just worry that while things may get less shitty because the pandemic moves into a less of an emergency stage, we have social fabric issues that have been made measurably worse and were already bad.

We do have social fabric issues, and it's one of the reasons when I was sort of talking about to me the kind of what are the pantheon of the most important issues I put democracy and climate change at the top and I said well Maybe inequality and living standards should be there too and I do really think that the decline and trust that we've had in society and the rise and anger a lot of it stems from the fact that huge numbers of Americans have not had rising Living standards. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but how could it not be a huge reason? We know that's the case, and COVID didn't create that, and it's not going to go away without COVID. And so I do really think that we have a bunch of extremely challenging issues. I think this isn't my line originally, maybe

obviously, although I'm either not remembering or I don't know who's it was. History is often a source for some optimists, which is when you look at some of the things that the country has grappled with in the past, when you look at the problems that we've had, it's not like things were great in the past and now we're going down this sort of cycle to hell. We may be going down a cycle to hell. There's no guarantee that we get out of this,

but the country has overcome enormous problems in the past, including some that I think are clearly worse than the problems we're dealing with now, particularly for people who aren't in privileged circumstances. And so I think sometimes when you look at history and you look at people who struggled to make a better society, there is some source of optimism that you can take from that. And on a smaller level, I do think a lot of people, the overwhelming majority of people

are fundamentally decent people who enjoy not being with all other people, but who enjoy being with other people. And so whenever we can get back to versions of that that look more normal, whenever school can look more normal, whenever the workplace can look more normal. And yeah, it looks more normal than it did in the summer of 2020, but it's still not normal. Whenever we can get back to that, ideally with this little virus cost as possible,

I do think that some of these problems we are going to realize really did, if not start with the pandemic, accelerate, reach a completely different level. When you look at the charts, you see the start of the pandemic on a lot of these measures of bad behavior. And I'm not sure what attitude to have other than I'm kind of optimistic that is certain normal forms of human behavior return.

We'll see some of this really bad behavior that we see in one place after another receipt. Let's end on that some optimism. David, thank you so much. Thanks for having me and thanks for such a thoughtful conversation. Pleasure. Thanks again to David really enjoyed that conversation. Also, thank you to the people who work so hard to make this show. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poient, and our friends over at UltravioletAudio, who do our audio engineering. We'll see you coming up on Friday for the second of our two-part series on the two-year anniversary of COVID. It's Lama Rod Owens, a fan favorite.

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