Omicron cases are falling – but the caseload remains dangerously high

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• Hari Sreenivasan:

  For more on COVID cases and the many different approaches countries are using to contain the spread of the coronavirus and its variants, I spoke with ProPublica reporter Caroline Chen.

  With this huge surge of omicron cases, are we close to that kind of magic notion of endemic that this is now in the population?

• Caroline Chen:

  So, unfortunately, we're not yet at an endemic state, either in the U.S. or globally. But I think it's helpful to understand what endemic actually means. You called it a magical state. I mean, I think it is. We prefer endemic to pandemic, but endemic doesn't really mean we no longer have to think about it. Actually, conversely, if you think about something like the flu, which is endemic, that means somebody is always going to have to think about it. There are scientists working around the year every year to try to come up with a flu shot for the next year. So once a disease becomes endemic, it does become part of our lives. It's controlled. We have an expected threshold that we are trying to keep deaths or hospitalizations under. But it doesn't mean like, we will never have to think about this again.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  I also want to point the audience to an article that you wrote just about going home to visit your parents in Hong Kong and what that taught you about this.

• Caroline Chen:

  When I went to visit my parents, which was late November, I got off the plane and immediately went through these series of checks where I got COVID tested. I had all these documents I had to prepare, which included a COVID test before flying presented. And most importantly, was that I had a hotel booked because Hong Kong has a 21 day hotel quarantine. That was when I landed. They actually just changed it to 14 days. And then only after you get through that hotel quarantine are you allowed into the city. So just a totally different model. And this comes from the fact that Hong Kong is still pursuing what they call a COVID zero policy.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  What do they do? What kind of steps do they take when they see that there is a new infection?

• Caroline Chen:

  Yeah. So the first half of my trip there, actually there were no cases that were in the city, so they were catching them in travelers while they were in quarantine. They test you every three days when you're in the hotel, so they're trying to catch these cases that are being imported in. And so actually, I spent Christmas with my extended family knowing that there was zero local transmission in the city, which was just such a different Christmas experience than a lot of the, you know, my friends in the U.S. Right at the end of my trip, they did have their first local Omicron case. They have the ability to do intensive contact tracing. This person went to a restaurant. They used credit card transactions to track all the diners, and they all had to go to government quarantine facilities.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  You're talking about. An environment that has been created by the government in Hong Kong, which allows you after you get through all their checks to have life as we would consider normal.

• Caroline Chen:

  Throughout this pandemic, I've heard so many times, why doesn't the U.S. do X that, you know, this other country does? There are trade offs here. This has had a huge impact on Hong Kong's economy and its standing and reputation as an international commerce hub. So these types of restrictions, I think in some ways, if you were just to look at the death toll in Hong Kong and compare that to New York City, where, you know, they've got a kind of similar population to Hong Kong, has been in the low hundreds versus tens of thousands. So on one measure, you can say this has been incredibly successful.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Caroline, when we think about a virus being just part of our society, that's dependent on it actually reaching everywhere. There's still huge sectors of the planet that haven't even had their first shot.

• Caroline Chen:

  One of the things we do know is that we can shape this curve still. So ending the inequality in access to vaccines around the world will get us to a more stable and better place faster. We also know that now so many people have been vaccinated to about two thirds of the world have gotten their first shot. Plus, you know, Omicron infections that we are not in a 2020 state anymore. And you know, our individual bodies and sort of as a population, we're better equipped to face Omicron. So even though we're not yet at an endemic state, the more people we can get vaccinated, the sooner our world comes to that.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Caroline Chen of ProPublica. Thanks so much.

• Caroline Chen:

  Thanks for having me.