This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Suddenly, the pandemic feels different. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu wrote yesterday, comparably low COVID-19 rates this winter and spring have marked “the longest stretch of quasi-normalcy that humanity has had since 2020’s start.” But it’s premature to call this the beginning of an after. I called Katie to discuss why.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
No Obvious Pattern
Kelli María Korducki: You write that although it’s true that things are better now than they were a couple of years ago, that’s not a totally fair comparison to make. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Katherine J. Wu: Think of what we’re comparing with. Two and a half years ago, we didn’t even have vaccines. And two years ago, we were at the point where vaccines were just getting out to wider sectors in the population. We didn’t have Paxlovid. It was still really hard to get rapid tests. We were just barely starting to assemble our whole COVID tool kit. So, sure, things are better now than they were back when we had virtually no tools at all. But now that we have all these boxes checked, shouldn’t we be aiming higher?
Kelli: Where are we falling short? And what would be needed to improve those outcomes?
Katie: No one can reasonably expect us to get to the point where things look exactly like they did in 2019. That’s just not the world we live in. But we did, for instance, show how good things could get when a majority of the population was freshly vaccinated and people were still taking behavioral precautions. We still haven’t gotten back to summer 2021 lows, when you adjust for the infection-mitigation and treatment tools we didn’t have then that we do have now. I think if people were more willing to stay up to date on their vaccines and to mask as needed, we would be in a better place.
Kelli: Looking ahead, what are the best-case scenarios researchers anticipate for the coming months?
Katie: The best-case scenario—within the bounds of realism of how Americans are likely going to act—is basically that the virus cuts us a break: We don’t get any massive Omicronlike events where the virus is mutating or evolving in such large evolutionary leaps that it circumvents our vaccines and totally reinfects everyone, and the health-care system gets overwhelmed. The realistic ideal situation is that our current lull in cases and deaths sticks, and the way things are now is how they’ll continue from now on, with maybe a seasonal infection bump in the wintertime. And maybe even this summer will be super, super calm.
There’s an even more aspirational scenario where we do better in terms of making sure people who don’t have health insurance are given access to treatments and vaccines in a more equitable, systematic way. But I think that’s rather unlikely, to be honest with you.
Kelli: And the worst-case possibilities?
Katie: Basically, that there is any variant that takes over. It wouldn’t even have to be as bad as Omicron was compared with Delta. And the big concern is that people are not staying up to date with their vaccines—the rate of uptake with bivalent boosters is still very worryingly low. Most experts I speak with are very worried that COVID-vaccine uptake every year will be far worse than flu-vaccine uptake, which is already pretty abysmal. And knowing that the population is letting its guard down, that is a potential recipe for disaster even in the absence of new variants, where more severe disease could happen.
Kelli: You also note that researchers are looking at this summer as a kind of predictor of where things could go. How so?
Katie: I think people forget about summer, especially because a lot of reporting in the U.S. is very East Coast–centric. But in the American South, summertime is really the indoor season for a lot of people—indoors is where the AC is—and people are perfectly happy to gather outdoors well into December, January, February. We’ve seen some of our biggest COVID waves happen in the summer, and that’s definitely not a coincidence.
I predict that the summertime will play a major role in dictating what the typical COVID annual schedule really looks like. Are we going to have big winter and summer peaks every year? Will this virus eventually take on more of a consistent flu-like pattern, where it’s largely restricted to winter? We have no idea yet. We don’t have enough data.
Last summer was a very BA.5-variant heavy summer. This summer could be another echo of that, or it could be completely different. It’s the kind of situation where a lot of experts are trying to figure out what’s going on. There is no obvious pattern yet.
Related:
Today’s News
- More than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America have gone on strike, causing shows such as Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to go on hiatus.
- The Biden administration is sending 1,500 additional troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in anticipation of increased migration.
- Australia will ban recreational vaping to crack down on usage by young people.
Evening Read
No One in Movies Knows How to Swallow a Pill
By Daniel Engber
There are two ways of taking pills—two and only two.
You pinch the pill between your thumb and index finger, pick it up, and place it on your tongue. You take a drink of water. This method is the tweezers.
Or else: You place the pill in your palm and launch it toward your mouth, as if your teeth were battlements and your arm a siege machine. Don’t bother with the water. This method is the catapult.
In real-world situations, many people—let’s say most—make a habit of the tweezers. In the movies, the opposite is true. An on-screen pill bottle works like Chekhov’s gun: Eventually, its contents will be fired at an actor’s mouth, or smashed between his lips, or hurled into his gullet.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. “Ozymandias,” a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley and part of a formative year in the high-school education of our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Then, read Atlantic writers on the educators who changed their lives.
Watch. Lucky Hank (streaming on the Roku Channel), a series that stars Bob Odenkirk as a professor going through a midlife crisis.
P.S.
For something completely different, Katie recommends a new Atlantic story about a perhaps underreported feature of a certain buzzy drug. She says, “Ozempic’s been in the news a lot lately. But my colleague Rachel Gutman-Wei puts a delightful and slightly gross new spin on the topic with her article on the drug’s bizarro side effect: sulfurous, rotten-egg-esque burps.” And there you have it.
— Kelli
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
