Today, Explained - New variant just dropped

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Seems like everyone’s got Covid again. Vox’s in-house epidemiologist, Dr. Keren Landman, delivers the good news and the bad news about Pirola. This episode was produced by Jon Ehrens and Siona Peterous, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's happening again. A friend got it. I think I got it at the Giants game. Then a neighbor. For the fourth time. Then a colleague. Good luck with that daily news podcast, y'all, but I'm out. And another colleague.

I've got the bug. Forbidly know it as the novel coronavirus. And another colleague. For the first time. Then Dr. Jill Biden got it. Like so many of you, I'm left asking, how do I keep my family safe? COVID seems to be everywhere again. There's a new variant, but there are also some fresh vaccines. A health advisory panel is deciding whether the updated COVID-19 boosters from Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna should be available to people as young as five years of age or are only groups deemed high risk.

On Today Explained, we're going to deliver some news you can use, whether you're still scared of it, totally over it, or somewhere in between. This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before.

So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. I don't know who needs to hear this, but y'all COVID is bad. I have COVID. I got caught in a summer search. And I got COVID again for the fourth time.

It really sucks I'm 30 for weeks and I've been having bad body aches. I am a nurse, y'all. A pediatric nurse. And we have been getting some COVID. And school hasn't really even started yet. Anyone else notice that like all the kids at school have COVID? I caught COVID on the way back from Grand Cayman. First week was, it was pretty bad. I had really bad mouth sores.

I was super tired. I had a fever. Today Explained is the show. My name is Sean Ramos-Verm. I'm here with Karen Landman, who writes about science and health for Vox and happens to be a trained epidemiologist. Karen, am I crazy or do a lot of people have COVID again? Okay, both can be true, first of all. But no, a lot of people do have COVID again.

It does seem that almost everybody I know either has COVID or recently has COVID. My parents had COVID. I had COVID in August. Lots of people on our work slack or recently has COVID. My parents had COVID. I had COVID in August. Lots of people on our work slack are out with COVID. A lot of people have COVID right now. It's everywhere. What is going on? Well, we had a wave earlier this year. Phase three of America's so-called triple-demic tonight sweeping the nation with a vengeance and pushing hospitals to a brutal new breaking point. Immunity waned and variants continue to evolve. And I think there are just now enough variants that can capitalize on the waning immunity

and not enough immunity to really fight them off. And so we're seeing a lot of people now susceptible to COVID reinfection, and that's what's happening. And anyone who pays casual attention to COVID knows that there's a new variant, but it sounds like you're saying this isn't all just the new variant. There's a bunch of variants out there. Almost none of this is the new variant that has gotten the most attention lately. It's kind of a mix of variants that have been emerging over the course of the last few months. You might have heard Eris.

You know, Eris is that Greek goddess related to dissonance and strife. And I hope Eris doesn't cause that much dissonance and strife. The EG5 variant, you might have heard Fornax. You might have heard, you know, other XBB. Are you just naming Elon Musk's kids with grimes? The AE is is pronounced Ash. Yeah. And then A12 is my contribution. I guess the point is, there's not one variant dominating the scene right now.

And the ones that are causing a lot of infections are not the one that has gotten the most media attention of late. With all these variants afoot, did people change their behaviors this summer? Not so far as I can tell. No one's testing that I know until they get sick. And even then, like people have run out of those free home tests. A lot of people either cannot afford or cannot find other tests in grocery stores and pharmacies. So nobody's testing unless they absolutely have to. And if they're lucky enough to still have tests hanging around. Very few people that I know are masking. I've done a bunch of traveling recently and I saw scant people either in the airport or on the airplane masking in crowded public spaces. I will occasionally see somebody masking and occasionally mask myself, but you know, that's the exception rather than the rule.

There've been a couple of polls recently about how concerned people are about coronavirus. And I think the last I saw there was a Gallup poll from sometime in the middle of summer, maybe June or July that said that maybe 18% of Americans are currently either somewhat or very concerned about coronavirus, which is almost at their all-time low. So yeah, it's just, I think, much, much less on the mind as a cause of concern for most Americans and I think for a lot of people around the world. So it sounds like people have sort of given up here. How about our governments, be it city, state, federal? I mean, we've talked about this before, but as promised in May, our government is no longer funding testing, treatment, and most of the other things that enabled a lot of COVID

protections to happen on an individual level. The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. Unless your insurance is great at covering those things or you are fine with paying out of pocket for those things, the personal protections are kind of gone. And the sort of more institutional wide types of protections like closing schools or the things that private companies or agencies could do to reduce spread like reverting back to a more liberal work-from-home policy at certain workplaces. You know, those kinds of things are on the whole really we're just not seeing that happening. In most places, we're not seeing huge demand to have that happen. I mean, we are seeing in hospitals, a lot of those healthcare facilities go back to masking. And that's different. Healthcare is, by nature, a much

riskier environment for the people who move around in it. So that seems like it would be sort of the first thing that I would expect to see change is more enforcement of protective measures in hospitals. But we're really just not seeing that at all on a society wide level. So it sounds like people have given up. It sounds like governments have given up. Where does that leave tracking this virus in a moment where you've got multiple surging variants? Yeah, I mean, it's not a new thing, but CDC has switched to tracking basically hospitalizations and deaths, which, as we know, are kind of late indicators of viral trends,

and wastewater. And, you know, there are various places to look at wastewater trends. And inside this fridge, they have samples from millions of people from across the Bay Area, stretching from Gilroy to San Francisco. You see here, San Jose, Palo Alto. You see over there, Stanford. I actually look at something called Biobot, which is a little bit easier to understand than CDC's read of this. It's the best real-time idea that we can get of what the virus is doing. It's also not perfect in many, many ways, but it's good. And hospitalizations, you know, usually lag infections by a few weeks, deaths by much longer, you know, weeks to sometimes even more than a month. But we haven't scaled up our public data

gathering and communication in response to a rise in cases. You've got people not caring, governments not caring, not enough data tracking, and a surge of variants. What do we know about this new one, Parola? Ideal if you're the virus, right? Yeah, great news for Parola. Right, great news for viruses that want to spread undetected. Parola is, just to be clear, it's not an official name. But the variant that it is intended to refer to is the BA286 variant.

So I'm just going to keep calling it Parola because nobody is going to know what I'm talking about if I say BA286. Who came up with this name, if not official? Who came up with a casual name like Parola? Oh, just a bunch of dudes on the internet. We're ranking girls. You think this is such a good idea? I need the algorithm. All right.

I need the algorithm. But in any case, it got a lot of attention up front because it looked really different from its ancestors. And it took the kind of genetic leap that Omicron had taken. And I think because of that, and because the leap appeared to be in sort of places on the coronavirus genome that have portended concern in the past, there was a lot of concern that this was going to be, you know, a real mover and shaker in terms of causing a lot of bad disease and spreading really easily. Scientists continue to be a little more concerned about this one, even though that case count is still very low. And that's because there are so many mutations and many of them are

in the spike protein. So it could make it more difficult for our immune system to recognize it. Are people dying, Karen? I mean, it sounds like the people in your life who've gotten this didn't die. And I'm pretty sure none of the people in my life who got it died, but are people dying? Yeah, so we have seen an uptick in both hospitalizations and deaths with this latest rise in cases, and that's not a huge surprise. You know, we know that COVID is going to be a player in driving respiratory illnesses the way the flu is a player, the way RSV is a player. RSV is a common cold virus that can be associated with severe disease in young children and older adults. Yes, we have seen a rise in hospitalizations

and deaths associated with COVID over this time. Most people are going to have a mild illness, but this is real. I spoke with one doc who is a hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, and she said that in her hospital since May, there had been maybe, I don't know, between zero and two people hospitalized with COVID

at any given moment. And that's now up to six. And yes, she said some of those people have an infection with COVID that is sort of incidental to their hospitalization, meaning like they came in with a broken hip, but it also turns out they have COVID. So, you know, it may not be the cause of their hospitalization, but there are people who are admitted to her hospital for COVID right now.

And they're not in the ICU, so they're not as sick uniformly as the same number of people might have been earlier in the pandemic, but they're hospitalized. So it's real. More with Dr. Karen Landman in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame and because she's a little bit older

it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself and because we're all connected over text message it was just so easy to send a link to everybody You can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout Today, Explained is back with Dr. Karen Landman from Vox. Karen, it sounds like the new variant isn't a huge deal,

but surging COVID certainly is a problem. People die. People get really sick. Is this just a cycle that we're in? Is this just the latest cycle of the cycle? I think we need to zoom out for a second. We're still talking about this using the language of the early pandemic. And this is a fundamentally different time with a fundamentally different

virus and a fundamentally different global population. Well, like, I'm not picking on you, but you use the word surge, which a lot of people still use to talk about rising cases of COVID. And it implies something, right? It implies that there's an overwhelming wave that maybe we can't cope with. And that's simply not happening with COVID anymore. We can cope with the waves now. There are more people in the hospitalized. There are more people dying now. But I'm not sure that anybody would look at the numbers now and call this a surge. I mean, I think, yeah, you'd call it an increase, you might call it a wave, but even the language that we're using is just dramatic, right? I don't think experts ever really expected COVID to go

away. So I think what's happening is that the virus is kind of stumbling toward endemicity, and this is what that looks like. We see cases rise. We see cases fall. We see cases rise again. We see cases fall again. And every time cases rise, we can notice that. We can attend to that. We certainly should be looking for signs that it may turn into something that's difficult for us to cope with, either on a personal or an institutional level. But I don't think we need to assume anymore that every time COVID goes up, we're going to see hospitals get packed. We're going to see waves of people dying. We're going to see a lot of unexpected stuff. When you talk about endomicity, are we talking about COVID becoming more like the flu?

Is that what we're talking about? It becoming an endemic and not a pandemic? Seasonality is a little complicated here because, you know, there is such a thing as a cold and flu season. It's usually fall and winter in the northern hemisphere. COVID doesn't seem to vary seasonally. It doesn't rise reliably in the fall and winter and then go down again in the summertime, right? We sometimes see bumps in the summertime and it just, it seems to more vary a an every few month kind of schedule. And a growing number of experts think that that is because of immunity and because of the duration of human immunity to this particular virus. it's not easily pegged to big events, big holidays, big changes in weather or other

sort of seasonal things that drive whether we're indoors or outdoors. It is still driven by human behavior. I don't want to say that, like, if everybody were to mask and everybody were to stay inside, respiratory viruses, including COVID, wouldn't all suddenly drop. They would. But in a world where most of us are out and about, very few of us are masking and taking a lot of precautions or institutions are not taking really big precautions in this environment, seeing these things wax and wane the way they are really suggests that the way human immunity comes and goes is a bigger driver of their spread right now than our behavior is. So there aren't COVID seasons, but flu seasons remain, and one seems to be around the corner.

And of course, getting COVID during flu season is more risky for you and perhaps those around you, especially if they're immunocompromised. So help us understand right now what people can do if they get it. Let's do some news you can use. Like, does testing still work? Are all these variants still getting picked up on the old testaroo? Oh, absolutely. So, yeah, we should definitely still try to prevent spreading it as best we can.

So that means if you're getting sick, good idea to mask up around people and stay out of circulation as best you can. You know, we should try to prevent spreading it. If you think you might be able to get Paxlovid or might benefit from Paxlovid, test. Paxlovid is the first pill that can help treat COVID after you've been infected. If someone is COVID positive, it can reduce their risk of both hospitalization and death by a lot. But yeah, I think generally, if you're getting sick, try not to pass it on to other people. And that might mean masking. it can reduce their risk of both hospitalization and death by a lot. But yeah, I think generally, if you're getting sick, try not to pass it on to other people. And that might mean masking.

It might mean keeping a distance. It might mean staying home from that birthday party that you were going to go to. But I think it doesn't mean shutting down your life the way we shut down our lives earlier in the pandemic. It also means you should get a vaccine. Like, the vaccine is going to help prevent you from getting sicker than you might otherwise get in the next few months. It may not prevent you entirely from getting infected. It probably won't prevent you entirely from getting infected. But if you get infected, you won't be as sick. That's good. And you probably will be less

likely to pass it on. And that's also good. And the vaccines are still good? Are they updated for the parolas of the world? So yeah, the FDA already this week has approved these new vaccines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has given the go-ahead for Americans to get the newest vaccine. My colleague Rachel DeRose has written a great story on Vox that answers a lot of the questions about it. Hi, it's Rachel here. Last night, the CDC announced that they're recommending the newest COVID vaccine for everyone six months or older. This vaccine targets a specific subvariant. And at the time that the CDC announced that they wanted a vaccine to target the subvariant, it was the dominant variant. That's not the case anymore, but the dominant variants

right now are descendants of this XBB line. And so it seems like this current new vaccine will be effective against the most prevalent variants in the U.S. at the moment. The previous booster was a bivalent shot, which means it was targeting the original COVID strain as well as the Omicron COVID strain. This is a monovalent shot, which is far more similar to what we were being vaccinated with when vaccines first rolled out, the first set of vaccines we ever got against COVID. The purpose of the COVID vaccine remains to prevent severe infection and hospitalization. It doesn't necessarily protect against mild infection or infection. Are we still learning things about COVID-19, Karen?

Oh my God, we're learning so many things about COVID-19, Sean. But what we're learning on a scientific level, I think, I'm not sure it's translating the way I would love to see it translate into society at large. I mean, you know, some of the interesting things that we're learning are actually about how much less at risk most people are for bad complications from coronavirus and from COVID infection than our behaviors would suggest. I mean, we are still acting as though a COVID infection is a newsflash, as though it is, you know, a reason to shut down our lives and isolate ourselves in the, you know, in the really difficult ways that we were doing very early in this pandemic where we had no tools and we have tools now. You know, everybody is

getting COVID now and almost everybody is recovering from it now with no problems. It's not, I mean, yes, we're still seeing a little bit of new cases of long covid come after repeat infections but i think the numbers are so so so much lower than the headlines would have you think and the level of alarm remains really high when people get infected hospitalization death even long covid are now much much less common as endpoints to infection than they were a few years ago. A lot more likely now is that you get infected, you get sick, you know, you have a mild to moderate illness, and you miss a bunch of important life things. You know, you curtail travel, you curtail other social activities that might be important to you.

If I am in my early 20s, which unfortunately I am not, or maybe fortunately, I don't know. If I were in my early 20s, which for better or worse, I am not. Same. And if I run like day five of a COVID infection and are feeling fine, and we were all gathering in a bar or going to the park, if it were early 2021, no question, right? I would stay home. I would tell everybody. I would not participate. I would wait until day 10, then I would test and test and test. And if I were negative, then I would start seeing people. Now, day five, I'm feeling fine. I'm probably not shedding virus anymore. You can go out. You can and you should go out. We can and should return to a semblance of normal life.

The fact that we're, we are still, there's so many people still shouting that we should not be returning to normal life in any kind of way. And that we shouldn't be using the tools that we have out there to help us returning to normal life. It's a really unhelpful mindset if you want to get people to ever take you seriously again. Because we are going to have to at some point respond in a more concerned way to another pathogen. But right now, COVID is no longer that pathogen. And we are allowed to evolve our strategies at the same time that the virus is evolving its strategies. And we really need to. Otherwise, we really endanger our ability to be effective public health communicators and authorities in the future. Read Karen Landman and Rachel DeRose at Vox.com.

This episode of Today Explained was a joint effort produced by Siona Petros and John Ahrens. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, mixed by David Herman, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard, with help from Amanda Llewellyn. The rest of the team here is comprised of Halima Shah, Abishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain, Rob Byers, Patrick Boyd, and my co-host Noelle King. Our managing editor is Matthew Collette, our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and we occasionally use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed on the radio by WNYC. The show is part of Vox, which is totally free. Thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. You can become a listener who contributes at vox.com slash give.

Thank you.