Ed Yong

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

250,000 Americans have now died of COVID-19.

250,000.

The spread of the virus is as bad as it's ever been, and it's almost certainly going to get much worse.

But with the president advocating responsibility and refusing to begin a transition, it feels as if we're headed into unthinkable danger without any sense of who's in charge or where we're even charging toward.

With the election now behind us, I wanted to mark this moment in the pandemic and try to understand how we got here and where things could go next.

In other words, how many people are going to die because of what's happening in politics right now?

That is a political question, but first and foremost, it's a science question.

And to help me answer that is science writer Ed Young.

Ed is a fellow staff writer with me here at The Atlantic, but he's also emerged as a leading voice on the coronavirus.

He wrote a piece for us two years ago, arguing that America was less prepared for a pandemic than we thought.

When the virus emerged, he came back from book leave to become a full-time pandemic reporter.

His work these past few months has been at the forefront of the conversation.

But he'll be the first to tell you he'd love to one day get back to what he was doing before all this.

Ed explains how America got to this point, what he thinks a Biden administration could do come January, and why he's more hopeful about a society sticking together amid a disease than he was when he wrote that piece in 2018.

Take a listen.

Ed Young, thank you for being here on The Ticket.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So

let's talk about this book that you were working on before the world changed that was

not anything like a pandemic reporting beat.

Right.

It was fun and wondrous and quite light.

It's about how other animals perceive the world around them.

So the extraordinary senses that dogs and birds of prey and all the rest use to perceive the same reality as us, but in a very different way.

So it's about snakes sensing body heat and fish producing electric fields.

It's about dolphins and bats using their own version of sonar.

So lots of really cool stuff

trying to get into the heads of other creatures.

So the overlap is bats between what you were doing and what's now.

Yeah, it's funny.

So there's bats as an overlap, but there's also, I think,

trying to empathize with experiences that are very unlike yours, which is something that I think the US has catastrophically failed at this year.

So I'm hoping that even, you know, in the after times,

a book which is about extraordinary feats of empathy will find its place.

The pandemic has been in your head at this point somewhat famously since two and a half years ago because of that piece that you wrote for us, because it was the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu pandemic and how unprepared we were.

Yeah, you know, I don't claim any sort of special prescience here.

I think a lot of people who've worked on infectious diseases, a lot of journalists and scientists have been warning about exactly this kind of threat for a while now.

We know that new diseases are emerging all the time, that old diseases, familiar ones like Ebola and Zika, are re-emerging and causing fresh problems.

We know that flu pandemics are a regular feature in our lives.

And I think it's clear that historically, almost every president in recent history has had to deal with some kind of major epidemic during their administrations.

Obama over his eight years had four.

He had MERS, a different coronavirus.

He had Zika, he had Ebola in West Africa, and he had the last pandemic of H1N1 flu.

So, you know, it was clear to me, even before 2018, when I wrote their big feature, during the last interregnum,

I wrote a piece about how Trump would handle a pandemic because it was clear that some major disease outbreak was going to hit during his presidency.

And in some ways, the surprising thing is that it took this long, you know, that it was at the dusk of his presidency rather than at any other time.

But I think these problems are inevitabilities.

The question is when, you know, there are uncertainties about the timing, about the nature of the pathogen, but there's always going to be one.

And there's always, you know, there will be one in the future.

Once we're over this,

those of us who are lucky enough to get past this are going to deal with more pandemics in the future.

Can I just ask, I got into political reporting, and I always like to joke that it was by mistake.

And the other joke that I make at my own expense is I never took a politics course or journalism class.

And you might argue that it shows.

Did you

what is your path into

being the guy who is into how snakes sense the world and how pandemics are going to do more harm to us than we ever imagined?

It's a very weird and circuitous and sideways path.

My interest was in science always since I was a kid.

I spent two abortive years in a lab trying to earn a PhD, but failing catastrophically at it.

A PhD in what?

It was in some arcane aspect of molecular biology that honestly I'm barely interested in and you definitely will will not be.

I have a master's degree in intellectual history at so like you want to talk about useless graduate degrees.

Let's go.

Well, you know,

it was some nitty-gritty about how DNA gets repaired when it's damaged.

I was truly, truly abominable at it and realized that I was much better at talking and writing about science.

So that's what I started doing.

I started writing as a blogger.

I had my own science blog and then just sort of gradually worked my way into the mainstream.

But no,

I don't have journalism training either.

I used to work at a cancer charity.

So I was interviewed as a spokesperson by hundreds of journalists before I ever became one myself.

So my route into journalism is really...

it's really grounded in frustration at how much of it is not good,

especially in like the health sector, which, you know, it's now a bit ironic then, like, sort of, you know, ending up full circle as being a, you know, full-time health reporter myself.

I mean, I have spent the last

two years on the campaign trail trying to figure out what this presidential election was going to be like.

I did not anticipate in any way the pandemic, as I said, which means that I didn't anticipate in any way the shape that the election would take.

But now here we are in the aftermath, the long aftermath of the election.

And

there's the political issues of President Trump not accepting that he lost.

And the issues that sort of come down from that of Republicans standing by him for the most part as he does that, the federal government, should it start the transition, should it not.

What I think often gets lost in that conversation is why that matters.

And so we've had over the the course of now two and a half weeks since the election,

the Biden transition team trying to say that everything is fine, that they can proceed, they'd like the transition process to start formally, but that they can get along without it.

But on the other hand, you had Joe Biden say earlier this week, he was asked what happens if there's not transition help on the pandemic stuff.

He said, likely more people will die.

How freaked out should we be about

what the human cost is of what is going on here?

Very, I think.

So

to an extent, what you've said is right in that, you know, the Biden team can start doing stuff and just having them in play, knowing that an administration that is actually going to even try to control the pandemic

is useful to people on the front lines, healthcare workers workers and public health officials who've just been demoralized throughout the entire year.

I think, you know, you will probably see some states and governors and other leaders looking to this coming administration and the task force overstand more for advice.

So it's not like they're sitting on their hands until January 20th and they can't do anything.

But I think

Any obstacle in their way,

anything that makes the transition period more difficult, is huge right now because this is such a pivotal time like we are on an exponential trajectory with the growth of this pandemic and that means that things go from bad to extraordinarily bad in a very short amount of time so every little thing matters even the tiniest differences that make the job of controlling the pandemic harder make a huge difference so you know let me just explain like quite how dire this situation is.

Trump has basically disappeared for the last 12 days, right?

He's sort of shut himself out of the public eye.

12 days is a really interesting number because that is roughly the lag between cases rising and hospitalizations rising.

So We know, therefore, that the roughly 1.6 million people who've been confirmed as infected with COVID-19 in the last 12 days are not factored into the horrifying stories we are already hearing of hospitals around the country and especially in the Midwest being overwhelmed.

I have talked to hospitals that are now at capacity, like they have hit their ceiling, they have nothing left to give.

And so over the next two weeks, you're going to see some fraction of those 1.6 million extra infections entering those hospitals.

those very sick, extra people are going to slam into a healthcare system that already cannot cope, that is already maxed out.

And that's just going to get worse because that rise in cases shows no signs of slowing down and indeed might pick up as people gather in multi-generational homes over Thanksgiving for long periods of time without masks and with boisterous conversation.

So we are already in a dire situation.

And because of the slow nature of COVID-19, the near-term future is already baked in.

So the question, what is at play now is basically all of December, like the choices we make now, and I mean we as like a citizenry and the political class, those choices have a huge impact on what will happen in December, like whether the healthcare system will,

I'm not even sure it's a question of whether parts of it will collapse, but like how starkly, how sharply it will collapse.

These are decisions that are now

like the stakes are going to play out in a matter of hours and days, not weeks anymore.

Yeah, and the stats are just so crazy.

There was one I saw that in North Dakota, one out of every thousand people has already died.

And that was earlier this week.

I saw that number, right?

In Iowa, you wrote about, was that two weeks ago when you said Iowa's hospital system is going to collapse?

And that's two weeks ago, right?

And now we're seeing the tail of that pick up.

And the governor of Iowa, who has been resisting COVID restrictions and who herself was showing up at events all through the campaign time,

because President Trump was making sure that he was going to win that state, because there was a Senate race there.

She was showing up at campaign events in closed rooms without a mask on.

And now, because of what's happening, the reality of the pandemic in her state is slamming into the political decisions.

Yeah.

And I also reported specifically on one hospital in Nebraska, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which I think more than any other hospital in the country was prepared for a pandemic.

Like they really took it seriously for almost two decades now.

They have the best facilities, some of the best people, they've trained, they've drilled.

And even a hospital like that cannot cope right now.

They really are at breaking point.

And, you know, you can look at the stats, you can look at the numbers, you can look at graphs that have suddenly turned into vertical lines, but I don't think that can prepare you for like just hearing stories on the ground.

You know, I've heard nurses who've talked about entire families that are just being wiped out.

You know, a nurse told me a story about a family where a grandmother, grandfather, and a grandkid and a child have died, and another child has been admitted.

A nurse said to me that she used to work in oncology, so she's no stranger to death, but she can't even process the amount of death that she's had to deal with over the last couple of weeks.

This hospital has turned an entire tower into like floor after floor of COVID units.

It's almost unfathomable what is happening to some parts of the healthcare system already, let alone what is going to happen in the coming months.

Aaron Powell,

one of the questions that I have had from the beginning of this is

what actual difference it makes the way that President Trump has been leading the response to this.

And I'll put it to you this way: obviously, the pandemic is everywhere, right, in every country around the world.

And also, obviously, the death rate in almost every country in the world is way below what it is in the United States.

And we are leading the world in the suffering from this.

But

there was a funny type piece, it wasn't meant to be that funny, but it was in the Washingtonian this week that was imagining Hillary Clinton had won a first term, but then lost re-election because everything else had sort of played out and the pandemic had hit, and she had tried to lead the response as president, but the political pushback from mask mandates and everything was almost heightened because it would have been a response to her.

So, look, I know your feelings on this, that President Trump has not given the resources or the leadership in taking this seriously that needs to be there.

But I wonder how much worse it is, you think, because of him and what he's done as president.

Yeah, so obviously a lot of vulnerabilities existed in the U.S.

long before Trump became president.

So, you know, hospitals were always going to be stretched thin.

Public health had been underfunded for a long time, even through the Obama administration.

You know, a lot of the inequities we've seen, the disproportionate toll on Black and Latino and Indigenous Americans, is due to inequalities and discrimination that, you know, have existed since almost the dawn of the country.

So all of that, you know, would have been in place.

The polarization you talked about would have manifested.

But there's so much that a better administration would have done that I think absolutely would have made a difference.

You know, Clinton was set to name specific people who had experience in epidemics to her transition team.

So we know even from the start, there would have been more expertise in the White House to deal with these kinds of problems.

Clinton would not have shut down.

down a pandemic preparedness team that was specifically focused on exactly this kind of threat.

Some of the testing problems we had this year were due to failures at the CDC, but the continuing failure to test is a fault of the federal negligence that we have seen.

If we had a better administration with actual scientific expertise, well, that actually listened to the scientific expertise at its disposal, we wouldn't be in a situation right now where we still had no coordinated testing strategy, where public health and healthcare workers weren't so utterly demoralized.

You know, I think it absolutely does make a difference having someone at the very top saying clear, consistent, empathetic messages.

That is what you want from a leader.

And, you know, let's say that having a different president does nothing to change the extreme polarization that we've seen this year.

Even then, even for people like me or for people who

working in hospitals or in public health, who

understand the stakes and who understand what the evidence is telling us,

having a president who is constantly downplaying the pandemic and not actually doing anything to try and fight it is massively demoralizing, even for people who actually understand what the stakes are.

This pandemic fatigue that people are experiencing isn't just coming from those who think that all of it is a hoax.

It's also coming from folks who just see nothing nothing changing, like just see America failing again and again and making the same mistakes again and again.

And, you know, I don't blame people for thinking, well, maybe it's all hopeless.

You know, I've heard very intelligent, very well-educated people who sort of understand what is happening think,

well, maybe it was unstoppable.

Like maybe there's nothing we could have done to fix it.

Like after all, it's so bad.

Right.

Almost a religious way of looking at this, right?

Like

an Old Testament full-on, like this was just the reaping that God was going to take or something, right?

Right.

But

it's not true.

Like the playbook was obvious.

Other countries, you know, from Australia to New Zealand to Vietnam to Hong Kong, have beaten this coronavirus twice now.

So it clearly can be controlled.

But I think there's just, it's very hard for a lot of people to grapple with the fact that America has done quite so badly.

Even those

who see the negligent approach from the administration, I think are struggling to internalize what has happened this year.

That struggle to reconcile the fact that America is one of the worst performing countries in the world at this pandemic.

with the rhetoric of American exceptionalism manifests in this fatigue, like this fatalism, this nihilism about maybe how the virus was actually always unstoppable.

Well, it's not.

We just never did all of the things we needed to do to actually stop it that other countries have done.

All right, we're going to take a short break.

When we're back, I'll ask Ed to point forward and tell us what the Biden administration could do once the new president is sworn in.

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So when you look forward to the Biden administration and what they're going to do, Biden keeps saying the first thing is you've got to get the virus under control.

What is the big question that you have about what that really means?

And maybe I'll ask you to incorporate this into how you think about it.

Dr.

Fauci did an interview this week now where he said he's not sure that a national mask mandate is a good idea because it might cause the backlash of because of politics, people not wearing masks, and that could lead to even worse infection rates in the places where the infection rates are already skyrocketing.

Biden has been wary of calling for a mask mandate, although he has been talking about how he would encourage masks for everyone.

So what's hanging out there for you?

So what you mentioned about masks gets at it, which is

how much can Biden undo the social damage that Trump has wrought thus far with the pandemic?

Biden can do a a lot of things.

Biden can roll out testing.

Biden can begin the mass manufacture of protective equipment like

masks and respirators and all the like.

He can shore up plans to ensure that the imminent vaccines are going to be distributed fairly and efficiently.

All of that he can do.

What is unclear to me is whether

by now, after

a full year of lies and misinformation about this virus, whether he can create the sort of collective urgency and will to act that has been missing in the recent months.

The masks question sort of plays into that.

I would say that

this is a thing that you need to bring social scientists on board for, right?

Like with all respect to Tony Fauci, a man who I respect tremendously, what you need instead are sociologists, sociologists, you need anthropologists, you need people who specialize in communications.

The task force is notably lacking in all of those things.

It has, you know, no one who I think would self-identify as a social scientist.

The Biden task force, just to be clear, that you're saying lacks in all of that.

Right, right.

That's going to be crucial

for undoing a lot of the damage that Trump has done so far.

When you were talking about that pandemic warning piece two years ago, you were on the previous incarnation of this podcast, Radio Atlantic, and you said that pandemic should be a unifying force.

They should be like the squid monster from Watchmen.

But while disasters bring people together, diseases tear communities apart.

That seems

prescient as many of the things that you've written about this have turned out.

Okay, so

that is interesting, right?

Because I'm not actually sure that's true.

I heard that that from an infectious disease epidemiologist and i think it's wrong because since this pandemic happened i've spoken to psychologists and historians who actually tell me the opposite that despite like the fear of getting infected from your neighbors epidemics and outbreaks do actually do what a lot of other disasters do which is bring communities together and that is what we need right now.

You know, I think the rifts that are happening in this country are not COVID related.

They're symptomatic of problems with polarization and disunity that have been going on for years now.

And COVID is sort of layered on top of all of that.

Yeah, it may be also that the disease brings people together for shorter periods of time, but now over the course of it, people are just getting tired of living in this world.

Right.

And, you know, for all the stereotypes of America's being a country of rugged individualism where, you know, people only look out for themselves.

I mean, we've definitely heard those perspectives in the news.

But the country has been, in my mind, surprisingly willing to go along with new ways of living.

that require them to make collective sacrifices for the common good.

So I'm talking about things like how everyone, well, a large proportion of the country did adopt physical distancing restrictions in the spring and that mask wearing, though polarized, is actually, you know, popular.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that number is an important one because every poll that we show, and yes, of course, polls have shown that they are

not to be fully trusted, but the numbers are so overwhelmingly actually for people saying that they do favor wearing masks.

And it gets turned into a partisan issue, which makes people think that it's a 50-50 issue, but it's not a 50-50 issue at all.

Not at all.

And there does seem to be, at least from survival instincts that people have of not wanting to do this to say that they would wear a mask.

Yeah, and let's take a moment to recognize how incredible that is.

This is a public health intervention which had 0%

acceptance in January, right?

No, almost to a rounding era, no Americans wore masks.

And now it's got majority support and approval.

That never happens.

You know, if you told public health people that a year ago, I think they would have laughed at you.

And this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the counterfactual of a non-Trump world.

If you actually had people modeling that behavior from the very start,

I think it would have made a huge amount of difference.

All right, let's try to make a move to a little bit more upbeat thinking, and then we'll end on some actual fun.

But we've had some news in the last couple of days about vaccines, two vaccines that seem to have pretty high rates of success.

How excited should people be?

How much should they be planning?

Like, okay, like July 4th, we're going to be out there at the picnics, or maybe schools will be sort of normal by next academic year.

Like, what do you think we are actually looking at here?

As a science journalist, I always sort of want to see the actual data, but let's take everything on face value.

Like if the numbers we've been presented are true, then it's a really good sign.

And I think a much better sign than a lot of people had even dared to hope for.

So there is absolutely hope on the horizon.

The challenges of distributing the vaccine efficiently and equitably are enormous and should not be overlooked.

It's not going to be like once we get FDA approval approval for these two vaccines that the pandemic is over, we can all go out into bars again.

It's going to be a slow process.

It'll take several months during which time we will need to still have testing and tracing and mask wearing and distancing and all the rest of it.

I think the combination of having vaccines on the horizon and an administration that's taking it seriously is really encouraging to me.

That said, the next few weeks and months are going to be really, really bad.

It's a weird thing for me to have to process right now.

The light at the end of the tunnel, much brighter than it ever has been, but the tunnel itself is really dark.

You know, that being said, if enough people actually take the vaccines, if the distribution goes efficiently, there's every reason to expect that towards the second half of next year, we'll start seeing some normalcy resuming.

You know, I think the way to think about this is we should be able to expect a normal, happy, joyous, hug-filled Thanksgiving in 2021.

And we really need to make decisions now for Thanksgiving in 2020 to ensure that as many of our loved ones as possible are still alive to enjoy the joy that Thanksgiving of next year will bring.

All right, let's try to end this on an upbeat note.

We started on fun animal facts, but I want you to come at me with some of your favorites here.

I'll start.

Tigers don't, none of them have the same stripe pattern.

They're like fingerprints, and the stripes are actually on their skin, too.

But that is basic stuff, and I bet you have much more than that to go.

And I should say, I come at this as someone who has gone on safari in South Africa.

I've been to the Galapagos.

I have photos of animals that I take all the time that are all over my house.

I've used them as my photos on Twitter rather than putting my face up for everybody to have to suffer through that.

But you, that's just me as an amateur.

You actually know what you're talking about.

That's right.

Yeah.

Boy, have you picked the right Atlantic writer for this particular exercise?

I have a list of the animals that you have used for your Twitter avatar, and I'm going to give you

a rapid fire set of facts for as many of them as I can.

So your current one is a leopard.

Leopard urine smells of popcorn.

So if you're in Safari and you smell popcorn, that's a bad thing.

You have sloths.

So three-toed sloths, even though they spend most of the time in the canopy of the jungle, always climb down to the ground to poop.

It's a very laborious process that puts them in danger and no one knows why they bother doing it instead of just pooping from the branches from which they hang.

Maybe because they're upside down?

You know, is that what?

No, no, no, you know, it would just, it would just fall to the ground.

Why the climb?

Anyway, giraffes.

You've had giraffes.

I read a feature for the Atlantic by giraffes.

Giraffes have incredibly tight skin on their legs.

They're kind of like compression socks.

And that's to stop blood from pooling at the bottom of their legs because they're so tall.

Also, fun giraffe fact.

You have seven vertebrae in your neck.

Guess how many a giraffe has?

I think, isn't it also seven?

It's something very big.

It is, in fact, also seven.

They're just very big.

I remember that from the Safari guide saying that.

Amazing.

Great, great.

I should have used more of the photos from the Galapagos recently because I feel like you might not have had quite as many fun facts about like blue-footed boobies and Christmas iguanas and that kind of thing.

But you know,

that'll be for next time, Ed.

You give me more prep time.

Amazing.

Ed Yang, thanks for being here on the ticket and helping us sort out all of this.

All right.

Thanks for having me.

Stay safe.

All right.

Talk to you soon.

Bye, man.

Bye.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe.