Today, Explained - The case for Covid-19 optimism

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Vox’s German Lopez explains why he feels optimistic about the end of the pandemic even though 500,000 Americans have died, the virus is mutating, and it’s going to take a long time to vaccinate the world. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. I wasn't planning on watching the men's final at the Australian Open in the middle of the night this weekend. The final, in my heart, was played days earlier between Serena and Osaka. But there I was, unable to sleep on a Saturday night. And what the heck? Tennis, Australia, fans in the stand. They're averaging like single digit COVID cases every day. It's escapism, a cheap vacation,

what life used to be like, so I turned it on. Welcome to the 2021 Australian Open Men's Singles Final. Novak Djokovic, Serbia, number one seed, versus Daniil Medvedev, Russia, number four seed. Djokovic is part of the big three men's tennis players who have won 57 of the last 69 Grand Slam tournaments in the sport. It's this insane, unprecedented dominance that doesn't really have an obvious comparison. Medvedev is part of a new class of younger dudes who threatened to creep in and upset that dominance, but so far so bad. and Sunday's final didn't help matters.

Djokovic wins the match in straight sets. The winning shot is this insane over-the-head volley twirl thing that doesn't really make any physical sense, and it wins the entire tournament. After that, it's all the formalities. The suits come out to thank the sponsors, thank the refs, thank the ball boys, hand out trophies. It's sort of perfunctory and nothing interesting ever really happens until the Australian Open in 2021. Jane Herdlicka, the president of Tennis Australia, is throwing all the pro forma thank yous out. And then she says something about the pandemic that's hardly affecting Australia. With vaccinations on the way, rolling out in many countries around the world,

it's now a time for optimism and hope for the future. The audience does not like it, but she persists. There are many other people to thank that enabled this great night to take place in the last couple of weeks. The top of that list is the Victorian government. Without you, we could not have done this. Again, the audience is angry. And all of a sudden, this isn't about tennis. Like everything else in life, this was about the pandemic. So long, late night escapism. But maybe it was my fault for believing I could find an escape in the first place. Things are really rough out here. This was a week the United States hit 500,000 deaths.

That's almost the number of Americans who died in both world wars combined. The virus is mutating around the world and poor countries around the world, as we explained on the show a few weeks ago, will have to wait much longer for the vaccine than the rich ones. It's easy to surrender to this idea that life as we knew it is going to take many more years to return. But German Lopez says there are reasons to be optimistic about the end of all this. Yes. And I'm not known to be a very optimistic person. If you've ever worked for me, my slack emoji is Eeyore.

Eeyore has been writing about the pandemic for Vox. I've been feeling like as best as I have about the COVID pandemic these past few weeks. And there's really three reasons. One is that new cases are just significantly down from the fall-winter surge. Meanwhile, vaccination rates have been going up quite quickly. And the other thing here is that in the next few weeks, next few months, the weather's going to start warming up. And as we know, COVID tends to spread more quickly in indoor environments, and people are pushed to

those indoor environments during the winter and fall. So, I mean, if you look at all those three factors, we're looking at a really optimistic time. I think this is confusing to some people to see this precipitous drop in COVID cases. I mean, we got an email from a listener saying, you know, a lot of people where I live in Wisconsin are skeptical that, you know, Biden's inaugurated and all of a sudden the cases are dropping. Is this really just as simple as a ton of people were traveling for the holidays and this thing just blew up and we saw a huge surge in cases? That certainly was a big part of it. The CDC was telling people to be careful over the holidays.

They advised people to not do Thanksgiving if they could. The government's top health protection agency now says ignoring those warnings and holding gatherings could lead directly to family members dying from COVID-19. But as we saw, like people did do Thanksgiving, they did do Christmas, they did do other holiday celebrations. As hospitals and hotspots struggle to manage COVID patients, tonight that feared holiday surge is here. And also not just in the U.S., but around the world, you saw this, particularly countries that were celebrating like Christmas and those holidays. But since then, it seems like in the aftermath, people seem to have changed their behavior. I mean, just practically, they're not going to Christmas parties anymore, right? So if that's been leading to cases dropping,

then maybe we want to keep that going for a bit. We are still in the middle of a pandemic. Okay, so cases are down. Let's talk about vaccines. We got even more good news this week. The FDA is meeting to consider emergency approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which in theory will add even more supply to a vaccine effort that has really ramped up in the United States? Yeah, it's certainly the case. I mean, there are a few ways to measure this, but one way to look at it is like last month, in the middle of January, states weren't using even 50% of the doses they got. Now it's pretty normal for them to be using 80 or 90 percent or even more than that. So states have just really ramped up how much of the doses they're getting. And on top

of that, they're getting just way more doses. 14.5 million doses this week, up from 8.6 million doses per week when the president took office. So right now we're about 1.7 million vaccines actually put in arms a day. That can fluctuate a bit based on like the weather as we've seen with the snowstorm recently. But 1.7 million, that's a lot. Like before Biden came into office late last month, he was aiming for a million a day. and we're already getting to the point where we're talking about getting double that a day. So that's a pretty massive improvement. So is it going to be like what I mentioned at the top of the show with the Australian Open, where things are getting back to normal? They can have this major international event, but there will be these COVID snags? Is that what it's going to look like with March Madness coming back or the NBA welcoming fans back in

or restaurants reopening for indoor dining? Yeah, I mean, my guess is like, even though cases have dropped and things have gotten better, we're probably going to see spikes here and there. Recently, we had the Super Bowl, right? And we haven't seen this in the data just yet, but if people were having like Super Bowl parties and getting together, they might have spread COVID. That might lead to like a brief spike in the numbers. And I'm going to guess that we'll probably have more of that in the future.

Hopefully, if this keeps up as it has, if we have like the vaccines still going out, if we have like people still obeying some social distancing and masking, then it'll still generally get better overall, but we will probably have spikes and probably have to pull back a bit here and there. And for a lot of people with kids, especially, I know the big question will be schools. When are they going to reopen? I know Biden has been bullish on reopening schools, but there's been a lot of pushback from teachers unions, which, of course, are supportive of Biden. Otherwise, how complex is that picture right now? The CDC just put out a guidance essentially saying that, like, look, schools can open.

This, as a new CDC report says, it's safe to reopen schools after months of COVID closures with or without vaccinating teachers. They just had to follow these precautions. And it's the kind of stuff that you would expect the CDC to be recommending at this point. Masking, physical distancing, testing and tracing, like even stuff like just opening a door to improve ventilation in your building, like opening windows, that kind of thing. But like you mentioned, teachers unions are really concerned about this. What we've seen from schools so far is that they do not seem to be a big source of COVID, but teachers can still get sick, right? They can be in the older population that is more

susceptible to the disease. So they're kind of worried about that. The good news though is with these precautions, it seems like that even limits transmission around teachers. So they can reopen. And we're seeing some states, more and more states now, really push forward with reopening. I think it'll take time. We're going to be seeing these hybrid models where you're still doing some in-person, but also still doing some Zoom school. And the hope is, look, if the vaccine rollout really, really goes forward throughout the summer, then maybe next school year, it will be fully in person. Okay. I'm all about the optimism, and I'm not going to rain on the parade.

But I have to ask, how do the variants complicate this picture of reopening and finding some level of normalcy in this new year? So, this is definitely a big concern. I mean, we've heard this week concerns about like a California variant. Now researchers are finding a variant here on the West Coast, and it may also be easier to spread and possibly more deadly. Before that, there were the British, South African, Brazil variants, like all of these. They generally have different characteristics, but generally the

concern is that they're more infectious. They might evade immunity. The good news here is like, based on the research we've done so far, the vaccines are essentially so effective that they still manage to be effective against a variant. So even if these variants are better at avoiding like some of the immune response than like original COVID. The vaccine is essentially fueling your body with such a strong immune response that it can still overcome that. That's subject to change if there are more variants and they're even better at evading the immune response that can change. But at least right now, there's really not much reason to panic yet. And will that get in the way of herd immunity, which is the place we really need to get to, to sort of move on from this pandemic?

Yeah, so generally herd immunity is estimated to be 70 to 80 percent, maybe higher, maybe lower. But I think the biggest problem right now, we are really ironing out the supply concerns with vaccines. They are actually getting out. States are doing a better job distributing that kind of thing. But I think over time, we're going to see more and more hesitancy essentially pop up where people just do not want the vaccine. I mean, we've already seen some of that in the surveys. And as that becomes a bigger problem, we're going to probably have to do something about that demand side rather than focusing as much on the supply side as we have been. More with Herman in a minute. 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 Aura frame 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. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Herman, the biggest barrier here

to getting to herd immunity is vaccine hesitancy. Is that right? It might not be the biggest barrier now, but over time it's going to become the biggest barrier just because eventually supply will probably outstrip demand. And we know from surveys that about 30% of the population doesn't want a vaccine. 30%?

Yeah, it's quite a lot. I mean, if you go back to the numbers of herd immunity, 70% or 80%, 30% would be enough to essentially squash those dreams. And it's especially bad because right now we only have vaccines authorized for adults, not children. So since 20 percent of the population is kids, that means we basically need every adult or close to every adult getting a vaccine to really reach herd immunity. And yeah, the polls suggest that is not the case right now. Another wrench in this is that, in general with polls, we know that the people who are less likely to answer them just have like lower trust in institutions.

And those populations are probably more likely to say they don't want a vaccine. So if anything, that 30% might be an underestimate. Why do people not want this vaccine? Do we have the reasons? A lot of surveys have tried to dig into this. On one hand, there is a small subgroup, and I think this is the one you hear the most about, but it's probably a minority.

And these are the conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxers, like you've probably seen somewhere online about like 5G or certain wealthy people. That the vaccine will leave an invisible digital trackable tattoo. That Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leader in the vaccine effort, is actually Satan. That the vaccine is part of a CIA Illuminati conspiracy to control the world. All that stuff, which is obviously false. There's a group that believes in that. And so they don't want a vaccine. The bigger populations are just people who don't believe that COVID is a big

threat. And because they don't believe in COVID is a big threat, they don't want a vaccine. You can probably make up a stereotype of this in your head, but it is like people who, particularly on the right, who supported Trump, who believed all what he was saying last year about how the coronavirus should not be affecting your life too much. It will go away. You know it is going away, and it will go away, and we're going to have a great victory. That's the kind of group we're talking about here. There's also a group of people, and some of these can overlap, I should say, but there's also a group of people who just think the vaccine process was too fast. I mean, Operation Warp Speed was a very catchy name,

but it also feeds into this idea that like we're going at warp speed, right? So maybe some corners are being cut. That's not necessarily true. We still went through the FDA three-phase process for this, but a lot of people still hold that belief. We've talked about the version of vaccine hesitancy that comes from sort of the conspiracy theory, the misinformation, the, you know, lackadaisical attitudes towards the pandemic to begin with. But there are legitimate reasons here that some communities in this country and across the world feel hesitant about trusting a vaccine, right? Yeah, that's certainly true. I mean, particularly the black community and minority communities in general, I should say, they have for years faced discrimination,

outright discrimination in the healthcare system. They've faced situations where they were literally being experimented on against their will. This is something that you can look back in the history of the US and it is stuff that has popped up repeatedly. So if you're living in that environment, it's kind of reasonable for you to be a little skeptical of the health care system.

You don't believe it's set up to protect you. You don't believe it's set up to make you healthier. And unfortunately, some of that is translating to distrust in the vaccine as well. And it's important to separate that out, not just because it's like a different group of people with different concerns, but like it also means we're going to have to have different strategies for addressing vaccine hesitancy in this group than others. Are there strategies in place to do that? Ideally, the government should have been doing this months ago, the federal government in

particular. I mean, I've been talking to experts about this for months, and every single time they were like, we should have been doing this yesterday. And I mean, what we have seen is like every once in a while, some public health official will jump on TV like Fauci or whatever and debunk some things. The process of the speed did not compromise at all safety, nor did it compromise scientific integrity. It was a reflection of the extraordinary scientific advances in these types of vaccines, which allowed us to do things in months that actually took years before. But that's not really like a concerted federal campaign. And the thing we really need here is like some sort sort of national PSA would be great. Let's get Taylor Swift to get her vaccine while being videotaped, recorded, encouraging other people to get vaccinated. But it's not Taylor Swift, right? It's Beyonce.

Right. Okay. I mean, if we can Beyonce and Taylor Swift and just about every other celebrity to get vaccinated, that would be fantastic. Like, I can do it live, stream it, put it on Instagram, whatever. Yeah. That kind of national campaign would help. But like I mentioned, different places and different people are going to have different concerns about the vaccine and COVID. So what works for, like, say, a Trump supporter who doesn't believe COVID is a big threat is not going to work for, say, a Black person who just doesn't trust the healthcare system. And so what the federal government and state and local governments need to do here is really fund and fuel these local efforts to communicate with people,

target specific groups of people, and tell them why their concerns might be off, what we know about the vaccine, what the research and evidence and all of that says both about the virus and the vaccine. Beyond messaging to vaccine-hesitant communities better, has the vaccine messaging in total been lackluster? I mean, this is a thing that could prevent you

from getting this terrible disease, but you hear a lot of people talking about the downsides, talking about the fatigue, talking about the lines, talking about the pain to sign up. I mean, much more than I feel like you hear people talking about how great it is to not have to worry about COVID as much. Yeah, I mean, this is like generally a medical miracle. I think one thing here is in some cases we've been looking at the wrong numbers. So we often talk about like when the Johnson & Johnson vaccine came out, the top line number, the one that everybody focused on, was that it was 66% effective.

And a lot of people were like, oh, that's not as great as the Moderna and Pfizer ones, which were 90 plus percent effective. But that's underselling actually all three of the vaccines. Because that's only estimating how many people get symptomatic disease, essentially, like some sort of illness. And what we've seen is that all these vaccines drive hospitalizations and deaths essentially to zero. Like that's the number you should be focusing on. Even if you get sick, like I don't know about most people, but personally, I could stand just like cold, cold like symptoms. I could even stand a fever. What I don't want to happen to me is getting hospitalized and dying. And that's exactly what these vaccines prevent.

But because of the way this has been messaged, I think some of that has really been lost. And what's the upshot of that? Are we never going to get to the level of herd immunity we need? Are we always going to be watching the Australian Open and enjoying the tennis

and then having it interrupted by COVID scares and lockdowns? And is that going to be the case in our schools and at our restaurants and everything else? You know, I think by the end of this year, at least in the US, we'll be looking at a much more optimistic time. We won't be looking at those kinds of situations nearly as much anymore. I mean, I've talked to experts about this and they have said, like, look, once they get vaccinated, they're planning like barbecues, they're planning like holiday trips again, they will hug vaccinated family members once they're vaccinated too. So I think we're going to start getting back to normal. The question really here is whether we hit that herd immunity threshold, like that's when we can really relax and say,

okay, this is good. But even if we get like 60% immunity among the population, that's still better. So if we can get to that point, we're talking about a situation where life is much closer back to normal. And look, we'll still get outbreaks. Even vaccinated people make it a little sick.

It won't be the COVID that originally showed up that really terrified a lot of us, but they might get like cold-like symptoms. Like it might be something more akin to like the flu. But at the end of the day, with this vaccine rollout, if we really manage to vaccinate enough people, we're going to be in much better shape than we are. Hermann Lopez is a senior correspondent at Vox. You can read his work at Vox.com. His Slack emoji is Eeyore. End of the road.

Nothing to do. And no hope of things getting better. Sounds like Saturday night at my house. you