“The ‘zero COVID’ dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy,” writes the Atlantic’s Ed Yong in his most recent piece, “How the Pandemic Now Ends.” Yong, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on COVID-19, updates his seminal March 2020 article “How the Pandemic Will End” in wake of the delta variant. Vaccines alone will not end the pandemic, he writes — the pandemic will now never fully end, it will mutate into an endemic. But how long it takes for that to happen depends on mitigation efforts — many of which have been eschewed by state and local governments in an attempt to return to “normalcy.” He joins us to discuss this stage of the pandemic’s estimated impacts on hospitals and vulnerable populations as well as how we’ll reach the light at the end of the tunnel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices