Two years into the pandemic ‘COVID is not done with us’

Judy Woodruff:

It has now more than two years since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 emergency a pandemic.

And last week, the death toll topped six million people worldwide, six million. In many ways, the United States seems to be moving into a new phase of the pandemic, but the virus remains lethal to far too many. The U.S. is edging closer to topping one million deaths on its own. The real number is likely significantly higher.

And, every day, an average of more than 1,000 people are dying from COVID across the country.

William Brangham gets some perspective on this moment and the state of the pandemic.

William Brangham:

Thanks Judy.

Back in the spring of 2020, when the U.S. recorded 100,000 lives lost to COVID, The New York Times ran this front page, with the names listed, calling those deaths incalculable.

In his new piece in "The Atlantic," Ed Yong writes: "Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of one million. What is 10 times incalculable?"

Ed Yong is a staff writer at "The Atlantic," where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his pandemic reporting.

Ed Yong, great to you back on the "NewsHour."

We are two years into this pandemic, and, yes, cases are dropping here in the U.S. and hospitalizations are not nearly as bad as they used to be, but, in your piece, you point out that if there was a hurricane happening every day that was doing as much damage to our country as COVID is, we would certainly be acting differently.

And your whole piece seems to get at trying to understand why COVID is different. Briefly, what did you learn?

Ed Yong, "The Atlantic": So, I think there are certain aspects of the pandemic that work against a broader social reckoning.

Of course, the virus itself is invisible. The damage it inflicts upon our society is often hidden from public view, in ICUs and in the privacy of people's homes. There is the fact that the pandemic is so long now. We have been dealing with it for two-plus years. It feels very difficult to wrap our arms around it. And I think if we constantly fail at suppressing its virus, no wonder people hew towards fatalism.

But I think some of the most important factors at play are the fact that the people who've died are not a random selection of Americans. They are disproportionately Black and brown, they are poorer, they are sicker, immunocompromised, they're elderly. They're people who often are marginalized in our society and whose deaths are regarded with lesser value.

It's a horrible thing to have to acknowledge, but that is what is happening now, and especially in the context of very privileged people. A lot of people in the press and in policymaking spheres, a lot of them got access to vaccines early and easily and became safe.

And this narrative has been for a while that, therefore, everyone else is safe, which is simply not true. I think that has greatly contributed to the normalization that we have seen.

William Brangham:

To that point, you also write in your piece that two successive administrations have floundered, is the word you use, in trying to control the virus, and that they largely pushed the responsibility for staying safe onto individuals.

What does that mean? And how did that play out?

Ed Yong:

So I think the pandemic has been sort of individualized for a long time.

This is a public health problem. It's a collective problem. And we need measures that protect the health of entire communities. So, things like masking mandates would fall into that category. Better ventilation would fall into that category, paid sick leave.

But, instead, we sort of push this narrative that it's all about personal choices. It's about whether individual people decide to get vaccinated or not. And that individualization has sort of absolved a lot of our leaders their role in actually putting in these other measures that would protect the health of entire communities, including those who are least able to make the personal choices that protect themselves.

And if you if you cast the crisis in that light, as entirely a matter of people failing or succeeding and doing things to protect themselves, then it makes their deaths easier to dismiss. It's easy for people to say, they died of COVID. They didn't do the right thing. Maybe they had already — maybe they were sick or had vulnerabilities beforehand.

And I think that that dismissal is hard, and it's unfair and unjust. I think that we should, as a society, take stock of how our collective failings led to this now almost one million deaths.

William Brangham:

Amongst those one million deaths, near one million deaths, you point out how something like 3 percent of Americans have lost someone very close to them. That's nine or 10 million Americans that have been touched by this.

But, as you point out, if it's 3 percent that have been touched by it, that's 97 percent who have not. Do you think that also contributes to why so many of us have been able to say, this is over, we're done, no more?

Ed Yong:

I do.

It's sometimes easy to forget, given how widespread and significant COVID was, that a lot of people didn't know anyone who died of COVID and, as I said, that those deaths were clustered among some of the most vulnerable groups of people. And I do think, yes, that absolutely has contributed to that — to some of the counternarratives.

It's easy to — it's easier to contest the significance of the crisis when so many people, especially people in positions of power, have been untouched by it.

William Brangham:

We are seeing now across Europe, in Singapore, in Hong Kong Omicron is now taking off again in vaccinated populations and unvaccinated populations.

And, certainly, to your point, it seems like we are nowhere near, really, being done with this.

Ed Yong:

I agree.

I think that, certainly, COVID is not done with us. And our decision to be done with it, it puts us on a path towards even more preventable deaths in the future. The CDC recently changed its guidelines for COVID, but if you sort of calculate, based on those guidelines, what level of death we should accept, it sort of baked in that we would sort of tolerate around 1,000 deaths per day across the country.

That is a lot of extra mortality. That's a lot of families who are going to lose people because we — our leaders have collectively decided that this is what we should tolerate.

But we don't have to tolerate that. We put in measures to protect lives for all sorts of things. You mentioned hurricanes. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 changed our lives in ways that we are still feeling today. We put in measures to protect lives from car accidents, from flu, from all kinds of things.

But there is a question about what sorts of deaths this country is prepared to normalize to and what sorts it draws a line under and says, no more. COVID can be the latter. We don't have to accept our acceptance of it.

William Brangham:

All right, Ed Yong.

The latest piece of yours in "The Atlantic" is called: "How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?"

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your time.

Ed Yong:

Thank you for having me.